Web Hosting Blog

A managed web hosting is a smarter alternative for any small to medium sized business, who wants to make an effective web presence but do not have the time, budget and other required resources of IT. Neither you want to invest in costly hardware required to host a website.

With a managed web hosting solution, an individual leases bandwidth, diskspace and other resources from a web hosting provider. The website is then placed on one of their servers chosen by you. Apart from web hosting, the web hosting provider provides you with number of other features which can prove to be beneficial for companies/organizations using Internet as a medium to accelerate the revenue generation plus attract new customers, which I believe is the main objective of any business.

There are various benefits of Managed Web Hosting for a business, some of them are listed below:

Professionals Take Care of One’s Website

When it comes to any business, as we all are aware, its better to let experts handle critical responsibilities for you. Failure to do so, would spend a lot of  amount of time and resources and ultimately add to the loss incurred by an organisation.

By, letting a professional web hosting provider host a site for you, you are getting rid of waste of time and resource required to maintain the website and related tasks. Their staffs consists of professionals and have good experience in maintaining the hardware and programming necessary for keeping one’s website up and running all the time. The uptime of a website is most crucial for any online business. A web hosts knowledge and experience can suffice your business additionally and you can direct your resources to other crucial tasks of business.

Save Crucial Resources by opting for Managed Web Hosting

Applying cost-effective techniques to any business is crucial in terms of its growth. Managed hosting has proven to be one such wise decision and has added exponentially for businesses profits.

If one plans to host a website and related components in-house, the hardware required isn’t cheap. Then, you would need professionals for setting up the server and the website. The costs charged by these professionals aren’t cheap. After the set-up is done, you’d later need them again for maintenance and resolving other problems, which means you would once again need to put hands in your pocket in order to make them payment.

This expenditure can be avoided by opting to submit your website to be managed by a third party professional, who charge nominal fees to execute the crucial tasks. The web hosts also offer range of different plans suitable for your requirements. They offer cheap web hosting solutions with Good Quality Branded Hardware with latest and up-to-date technologies. They take complete responsibility of keeping the servers up and running, incase a problem does occur, they can get that sorted within few minutes. You can get an option of switching between plans , depending on the provider they offer Windows Web Hosting as well as Linux Web Hosting solutions. Incase you run out of resources you have the privilege of upgrading to a higher plan within minutes. The only task that you or the owner of the website needs to do is to keep the website updated for the visitor. Varying from web host to web host, come provide back-ups of the sites and applications.

Secure payment gateways play an important role in any online business that involves online transactions. E-commerce websites, web hosting are few of such businesses where Payment Gateways are often required.

A payment gateway facilitates the transfer of information between a payment portal (such as a website ) and the Front End Processor or acquiring bank.

When a customer orders a product from a payment gateway enabled merchant, the payment gateway performs a variety of tasks to process the transaction:

1. A customer submits an order on website .

2. The web browser on the customers end, encrypts the information to be sent to the merchant’s web server. This is done via SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption.
3. The transaction details are then forwarded to their payment gateway. This is again an encrypted connection.
4. The transaction information from payment gateway is forwardee to the processor used by the merchant’s acquiring bank.
5. The processor then forwards the transaction information to the card association (For example: Visa/MasterCard)
6. If an American Express or Discover Card was used, then the processor acts as the acquiring bank and directly provides a response of approved or declined to the payment gateway.
7. The card association routes the transaction to the correct card issuing bank.
8. The credit card issuing bank receives the authorization request and sends a response back to the processor with a response code. In addition to determining the fate of the payment, (i.e. approved or declined) the response code is used to define the reason why the transaction failed (such as insufficient funds, or bank link not available)
9. The processor forwards the response to the payment gateway.
10.The payment gateway receives the response, and forwards it on to the website (or whatever interface was used to process the payment) where it is interpreted and a relevant response is relayed back to the card holder and the merchant.
11. All this procedure usually gets completed in 2-3 seconds.

Most of the payment gateways provide tools that automatically screen orders for fraud and calculate tax in real time prior to the authorization request being sent to the processor.

List of different Payment Gateways :

PayPal : PayPal is one of the highly used payment gateways in any online business for money transfer. PayPal performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. There is a nominal transaction fee charged for receiving money.

Google Checkout : Google Checkout is another online payment gateway service provided by Google. It aims to simplify the process of online payment. Users can store their credit/debit card and shipping information in their Google Account, so that they can purchase at participating stores at a single click of a button. Google Checkout also offers fraud protection as well.

2Checkout : 2CheckOut provides you with a customizable transaction interface, multi-level customer service interaction and a satisfaction survey system that is completely voluntary and, in most cases, customer initiated.
Money Bookers : Moneybookers is an e-commerce business that allows payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. It serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. Moneybookers performs payment processing for websites, online auction sites, and other corporate users. Moneybookers requires identity verification before using their service to minimize fraud and prevent money laundering. This gateway does not usually get involved in merchandise disputes and the availability of credit card chargebacks may be limited.

Most of the reputed large web hosting providers use any or all of the above mentioned payment gateways for their online transactions.

White listing and Black listing are common tactics used for data security.

Black listing is security trick of allowing information about known malware.

White listing permits only safe programs to run. These two are security tricks used by many businesses where keeping the computers free from malware is of utmost importance. Major resources are spent by IT departments for keeping away the bad stuff or finding and removing the unwanted malware. Trojans, Viruses, Malware and Spyware or any such unwanted programs can cause damage to computer’s or the complete network.

Black listing is a common data securities or prevention methodology. Antivirus and antispyware programs after regular intervals scan the system for catching the unwanted programs and remove them from the hard drive.

Whereas White listing only permits known or approved software’s to install and run.

Sometimes both the techniques are used for more efficient protection. It is called the white over black methodology. In this only approved programs are run, users can remove the system slowing programs such as Anti-virus and Anti-spyware.

Different white listing products use varied strategies to block executable files from running.