Web Hosting Blog

As an amateur, any webmaster can get confused with the common web hosting terms which can make things complicated. Therefore, below is a list of commonly used terms in the business of Web Hosting.

Bandwidth : Bandwidth is the term that is used to describe the amount of data that is passed or is estimated to travel across a communication channel in an estimated period of time. It can be measured monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or Annually. It depends on the plan a client signs-up for.

Hosting Plan (Dedicated Hosting) : A dedicated hosting is recommended for websites that incur high amounts of traffic. A user gets complete root/administrative access to the server. Same is the benefit with a VPS or Virtual Private Server.

Gigabytes (Hard Disk Space) : It is an unit to measure a computers storage capacity. One Gigabyte equals one billion bytes.

DNS : DNS is an abbreviation of Domain Name Server. It differentiates between different institutes such as .com, .us, etc.

Domain parking : When an individual or any company purchase domain names and keep it unused is known as domain parking. Later when required, they can link those domains to their required old domain. Domain parking has become a common way of business, individuals buy domains in a bulk, park it and then resell it at a higher price.

FTP : FTP or File Transfer Protocol is a common way of transferring files or data across a network in a secure way.

Auto-Responders: While auto-responders are not email accounts in themselves, they are assigned an email address and it auto-respond to anyone who sends them an email. The reply is a pre-formatted email and every response is identical to the corresponding queries.

HTTP and HTML : HTTP or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol is used inorder to request or transmit web pages and components over the Internet and various other computer networks.

HTML is an abbreviation of Hyper Text MarkUp Language which is used to structure the multimedia and text present in a website. It also creates hyper text links between electronic documents.

ISP : One might be aware of this, an ISP is the Internet Service Provider. An ISP is essential if one wishes to connect to their servers.

There are many more terms that I would describe in my later post. The above mentioned terms of Web Hosting are some of the very commonly used one’s and are essential for a webmaster to know.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) or VPS Hosting as more commonly referred, is enabled with the partitioning of a high specification machine into Virtual Servers. Like the dedicated servers, VPS too provides private environments to the customers.

VPS offers similar features as that of a dedicated server. The VPS web hosting is available in two options 1. Windows VPS Hosting and 2. Linux VPS Hosting.

Multiple operating systems or software’s can be run on the same physical server, yet offering completely private server environment similar to the dedicated server environment. Every VPS hosting environment is entirely independent from other VPS systems and memory, the CPU processes and disk space can be segregated for each Virtual Private Server. This offers most of the benefits as that of a dedicated server but at much lower prices.

Below are few other benefits of Windows VPS hosting and Linux VPS Hosting.

a) Individual secure and separate VPS hosting environment

b) Offers the ability to host multiple web-sites on a virtual server(s)

c) Offers enhances control which includes server back-ups and reboots

d) Complete anti-virus protection

e) Virtuozzo power panel offering

f) Plesk control panel for Windows

g) Complete remote control and access of VPS servers

h) The ability to install and configure whatever applications the client wishes on the VPS server

i) Highly flexible servers can be upgraded without any kind of interruption in the services(depends who the web host is)

j) Fully managed servers which include updates on operating system.

VPS hosting provides customers with more secure hosting environment, with complete root access and the ability to configure and install anything that the customer wishes within his/er environment. On a particular machine there are more than one virtual servers, none of the users can view, change, configure, de-configure, install, uninstall  or delete any data from the other VPS account on the same server.

To learn more about VPS features, benefits and usage, please refer to the below given links:

• Future Web Hosting Initiates With Virtual Private Servers

• Virtual Private Server (VPS) And Types Of VPS Control Panels

• Windows Virtual Private Server Hosting Explained In A Simple Way

Virtual Private Server Hosting or VPS hosting is one of the most popular types of Web Hosting Solutions. VPS hosting solutions are offered on Linux as well as Windows operating systems. VPS has secured a major role in the web hosting industry. Hence, it becomes important to know the types of VPS products to be used in a given service. Below is a brief description of control panels offered by different Web Hosting for VPS hosting.

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server, it allows multiple Virtual Servers to run within a single physical server. Each VPS is allotted a specific portion of resources. So, regardless of what resources other VPS’s on the same server use, the amount of RAM and hard disk space allotted to a particular VPS will not get affected. One VPS on a server cannot use the data or even view other VPS’s data. Hence, each VPS has its own server load. It can be individually rebooted. It acts similar to a Dedicated server.

There are different types of control panels offered by Web Hosting firms for VPS.

Types Of VPS Control Panel

- Xen : This control panel is new as compared to the other control panels and is yet underdevelopment, yet it has become very popular and many Web Hosting companies have already adopted it with VPS. The basic reason for this popularity is its efficiency in limiting the amount of system resources that is used. Usually a VPS control panel use high resources when running on the server. But Xen has a different usage technique of resource management. The features of Xen and Virtuozzo are very similar except that it does not support Burstable RAM as of now.

Xen is yet underdevelopment so users might find some bugs.

- Virtuozzo : This is one of the most preferred and widely used control panel. Virtuozzo is developed by SwSoft. It allows users to handle their VPS very similar to a dedicated server. Virtuozzo allows users to use Burstable RAM. Burstable RAM is a technology which too is supported by SwSoft. When a users needs more RAM than the usually needed then there is an additional RAM used by users on the server, Burstable RAM allows that user to use more RAM for a limited period of time. This feature makes Virtuozzo pretty flexible and useful.

- Vmware : Vmware is one more leading control panel preferred in the Web Hosting industry. It allows users the exact opportunities as that of Virtuozzo except the Burstable RAM technology. But it supports technologies such as Multi-OS or Multi-based Operating System. With this, more than one Operating System’s can be provided to work on the same server. This helps in reducing the costs of the companies by not needing to buy another server for a different OS.

Windows Virtual Private Server Hosting is one of the types of Windows Web Hosting.Windows VPS (Virtual Private Server) is gaining popularity in today’s Web Hosting Industry.

The VPS hosting is a type of web hosting in which users are provided with a server that offers the users with a dedicated environment despite the fact that the server is similar to a shared server on which some other clients too might have an account. To make it more clear some Virtual Private Servers are hosted on a common physical server. The Windows Virtual Private Server Hosting is considered to be one of the best Windows Web Hosting solutions for clients who own their large corporate websites and expect a dedicated environment for their websites. The Virtual Private servers are usually provided with SSH root access due to which the clients can easily manage their servers with remote desktop for Windows VPS hosting. Windows Virtual Private Server Hosting is gaining reputation to be reliable as the clients are not affected due to changes or installations made by other clients shared accounts on the same physical server.

The VPS is considered to be a perfect combination of Windows dedicated hosting and Windows reseller web hosting. One of the most beneficial features is that multiple domains can be hosted under the same account similar to the dedicated server hosting solutions. VPS’s are more reliable than the shared web hosting and the reseller web hosting as it offers dedicated environment. The resources offered to a client cannot be used by other clients on the Windows Virtual Private server. This is the major difference between Windows VPS hosting and the Windows reseller hosting or Windows shared hosting. VPS hosting is also much more reliable if compared with them. The clients can install programs and softwares on the server, such installations does not affect the other customers hosted on the same physical Windows Server. This is one of the aspects that attract clients to choose a Windows VPS Hosting package for starting their own Web Hosting company. Virtual Private Servers are usually offered with a control panel inorder to control the activities on the server. The control panels are designed for multiple usage’s. Some for web hosting purpose and some for administration purposes of Windows Web Hosting Servers. Normally Web Hosting companies provide Plesk control panel for Windows Virtual hosting. The main use of the control panel is to allow web hosting providers to manage their web hosting accounts and clients to manage their web hosting plans.

Its important to understand the limitations and problems of Shared and Dedicated web hosting needs to be known for a better understanding of clustered web hosting.

A normal shared web hosting is popular in the world of web hosting as it is cheap and affordable. The web hosting companies distribute the clients of shared web hosting between different servers. For example a web hosting company has 500 customers. It distributes the customers in the following manner:

100 Customers on Server 1

100 Customers on Server 2

100 Customers on Server 3

100 Customers on Server 4

100 Customers on Server 5

This type of method has a lot of disadvantages, take for example if the server 1 goes down or has some functional problem i.e. it goes offline, then all the customers hosted on that server would get affected and will not be able to receive the service. Even the web hosting service provider cannot tell due to what the server crashed or is not functioning, there might be several reasons why the shared server goes down:

The other customer accounts use all the server resources because:

• The users get hacked through an insecure script or site.
• The uses receive some other major exposure or are naturally becoming very busy.

The servers usually suffer the following failures:

• Disk failures
• Many other components fail
• Supply of Power fail

Maintenance of the Server

• Upgradation of the server hardware or the preventive maintenance.

• Upgradation of the firmware

• Upgradation of the software

The account of the customer gets suspended in case of excessive CPU usage. The hosting companies use a tracking tool to check the usage, the account gets suspended before it affects the server negatively. Such suspension might prove to be fatal if there is a lot of traffic on the web-site. Under normal load the speed of the site depends on the activity on the other sites hosted on the same server. The hosting companies try to distribute the load evenly across the entire server. But the traffic on the websites is dynamic, so even after the load balancing the server might get overloaded. As the website gains popularity and the traffic increases the web hosting package should be upgraded from a shared hosting package to a virtual private server or a dedicated server package. Moving the web-site to a dedicated server or a virtual private server offers dedicated resources to the site.

In a clustered system multiple server are load balanced, hence the reliability increases. When the number of servers increase the overall load decreases. Load balancing allows all the resources to be available to all the customers. It helps to handle busy websites and unexpected traffic.

With the development of Internet the e-commerce services too have increased rapidly.There are varied types of web hosting services that are available with various web hosting service providers. Below are the different types of services offered in Web Hosting category.

1. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
2. Dedicated Hosting,
3. Free Hosting,
4. Shared Hosting,
5. Clustered Hosting,
6. Reseller Hosting,
7. FFmpeg hosting,
8. Blog hosting,
9. Image hosting,
10. Video hosting,
11. DNS hosting,
12. E-mail hosting,
13. Application hosting,
14. Social network hosting,
15. Game server hosting.

1. Virtual Private Server (VPS): The VPS is also referred as Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS). It is a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers in a way that the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. Every virtual server can run operating system on the individual partition.

The VPS is as good as a dedicated server but the VPS package is cheaper than that of the dedicated server package.

2. Dedicated Server Hosting: The dedicated server hosting is also called as managed hosting service. It is a type of hosting service where the client leases the entire service. The server is not shared with any of the other clients. This type of service offers more rights and flexibility than the shared hosting as the client has the complete control of the server. The client can decide the operating system to be installed or the hardware to be selected as per requirements. The server administration can be provided by the hosting company. The dedicated server is often housed in the data centers.

3.Free Hosting: Free web hosting is just an advertisement tactic, actually its never free. Free web hosting has a lot of limitations, such as:

• Limits on the hosted files
• Smaller bandwidth
• Disabled hotlinking files
• File type restrictions
• No uptime guarantee
• No allowance of custom URL’s (Pronographics)

Extra features That May be Available:

• Web based control panel
• Free email accounts for the domain and sub-domain
• File transfer through FTP
• Forums and community resources not typical to paid hosts.

4.Shared Hosting: In shared hosting many sites may be hosted on a single server. The resources of a single server are shared between multiple customers. A shared web hosting option is one way of cheap and economical option of hosting the web-site. Many users share the overall cost of the server maintenance.

5.Clustered Web Hosting: The clustered hosting technology is designed to eliminate the problem of typical shared hosting infrastructure. This technology provides customers with a clustered handling of security, load balancing and the required website resources.

6. Reseller Hosting: Reseller hosting is a type of web hosting where the account owner has the privilege to use the allotted hard drive space and bandwidth to host websites on behalf of the third party. The reseller buys the web host’s services and sells them to its customers. A reseller does not require an extensive technical knowledge of web hosting.

7. FFmpeg hosting: FFmpeg is the term that is referred to every assortment of software that is freely available. It is helpful form recording, converting and streaming of digital video and audio files. It falls in the category of video hosting services.

8.Blog Hosting: Weblog / blog software/blogware is a type of software that consists of a specialized form of content Management system desigined specifically for creating and maintaining weblogs.

9.Image Hosting: An image hosting service allows individuals to upload images to an Internet website. The image host will then store the image onto its server, and show the individual different types of code to allow others to view that image.

10.Video Hosting: A video sharing service allows individuals to upload video clips to an Internet website. The video host will then store the video on its server, and show the individual different types of code to allow others to view this video. The website, mainly used as the video hosting service, is usually called the video sharing website.

11.DNS Hosting: It is a type of service that carries out Domain Name System servers. Free DNS hosting services too are available.

12. E-mail Hosting: E-mail hosting service is another type of Internet hosting service which runs e-mail servers.

13. Application Hosting: An application service provision is a type of a business that provides computer based services to customers on the network. The most limited sense of this business is that of providing access to a particular application program (such as customer relationship management) using a standard protocol such as HTTP.

14. Social Network Hosting: A social network hosting service is a web hosting service that specifically hosts the creation of web-based social networking services, alongside related applications.

15. Game Server Hosting: A game server might be leased by game clients for playing multiplayer games over the internet. The Game server Providers (GSP’s) are the companies that lease dedicated game servers. Game server providers often offer web based tools to help control and configure the game servers

Experts of the Hosting Transformation Summit believe that Virtual Private Server (VPS) is the future of Web Hosting industry.

Exactly like the stand alone web server, Virtual Private Server (VPS) can perform and execute the tasks. The VPS hosting technique includes multiple servers on a single physical web server. The physical server is split with the use of highly sophisticated kernel based partitioning software. Every VPS has its own hard disk, IP, operating system, RAM and control panel with complete root SSH access and 100% guaranteed equal share of CPU processing power. The most important quality of the VPS is that any VPS account cannot affect the other accounts in spite of using the same hardware.

FEATURES:

Every VPS account has its own system configuration files and applications.

Every VPS account has its own processor, users, files with full access of the root.

Every VPS account can have its own system libraries or else, the existing can be modified.

Every VPS account can have its own IP addresses, port numbers, tables, filtering and routing rules.

BENEFITS

Any VPS file cannot be accessed by any other VPS account or VPS user present on the same hardware, hence enhancing privacy and security.

The VPS users have the complete control of the root, which enables users to modify server configuration files, install software’s and applications.

Every VPS user gets the complete hardware resource, hence every VPS user present on the same hardware gets equal optimum resources.

VPS account is much cheaper than going for a dedicated hosting account. Day by day VPS web hosting account is preffered by more and more users. VPS hosting falls in the category of cloud/grid computing and virtualization computing. VPS technology is an advanced technology of the future of web hosting.

Shared Web Hosting can also be termed as Budget Web Hosting. Shared web hosting is the most common web hosting service. If you have chosen a shared web hosting package then your account shares the same server with many other website accounts. The resources of a single server is shared with multiple customers, hence it becomes economical for both the web hosting company as well as the website owner or customer. Every website shares the same IP (Internet Protocol) address as well as the host name in shared web hosting. This type of hosting can be selected when your website is new and the web traffic is less. But as the traffic increases one should upgrade the web hosting account to a better package which might be dedicated server hosting or semi-dedicated web hosting, because as your website shares the resources of the same server with other websites the speed and performance of your website gets hampered. This in return might affect the traffic to your website.

VPS web hosting is similar to a dedicated web hosting operationally. It presents users root SSH access, administrative tools, privilege to install software’s and applications. The only difference between VPS hosting and dedicated hosting is the price, VPS is much more cheaper and affordable than dedicated web hosting. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server, hence as the name suggests, users get to use a virtual atmosphere with the privileges very similar to dedicated server resources. Choosing a VPS package enables users to create, modify and delete e-mail accounts. They can manage the servers as per their requirements. Users can install whichever software or operating system as per requirements. The resources of the server are not shared with any other customer or website which is the opposite case in shared web hosting. So, indirectly you are the owner of the server and can do any operation you wish to.

Affordable server

A business or an individual looking for a server to run a mission critical website always wants a reliable so that the website hosted on the server will not have to face downtime. If a mission critical website faces downtime due to some reason than the owner of the website, whether it is a company or an individual will suffer from heavy losses. To avoid these losses, a company or an individual running a mission critical website has to opt for a reliable server to ensure that the website is available all the time. They can choose Affordable servers as a solution for this. Affordable servers are available in the form of a VPS server or a Dedicated server. These servers are a very good option in comparison to most of the reseller or shared hosting servers as they are not reliable. Affordable servers are reliable as these servers have a good specification and also these servers offer a dedicated environment to the owner. These servers have a good specification as the hardware costs of these servers have gone down and the wholesale bandwidth is now available at a lower cost. Also, nowadays you will find many of the hosting providers in the market due to which the competition level has increased and this was not the case in the past. Affordable servers do not have a minimum term contract in most cases and hence it gives an opportunity to the client to change the web hosting provider if the client is not happy with the level of service which is being offered by the web hosting provider. Affordable servers also offer a kind of dedicated environment to the client and due to this kind of environment the client can install desired programs in the server, and the best part is this kind of installation will not affect the other users of the server.

Affordable VPS servers:-

Affordable VPS servers are available in the form of VPS servers which are available at a lower cost. VPS servers are in the form of virtual hosting, this means that the server you are provided is not actually a dedicated server but offers you the features of a dedicated server with a dedicated environment. A VPS server is a virtual server which is setup on a physical VPS node and is dedicated to you so you can install the programs you want without affecting the other users using the server. Affordable VPS servers are also provided with Linux or Windows operating system so that you can choose the operating system which is more suitable to you. Such kind of Affordable VPS servers are generally chosen by individuals having a lower budget to hire a server and want to use the VPS server for development purpose. On the other hand, Affordable VPS servers can also be chosen by organizations having insufficient budget for a dedicated server or by the organizations that do not need a high specification server for their websites. Generally organizations need a high end VPS server with a high specification so that it is reliable for their website like the dedicated servers are. Also, organizations need a server from a professional web hosting provider capable of providing reliable servers with a good web hosting service and customer support which can provide support if there is any problem with the server.