Archive for June, 2009
UltraHosting Review – Green Web Hosting
June 28th, 2009 | 
Author: UltraHosting is a leading web hosting provider for business needs. They have over 25 years of expertise in server and hosting management. Not only are they pioneers in hosting management, but also in initiating socially responsible measures. One such action is their collaboration with CarbonFund.org.
Ultrahosting understands that our planet’s future will be secured if we take action today. They have partnered with CarbonFund.org to reduce or avoid carbon footprints. By hosting your site on Ultrahosting, you can make sure that your servers will not negatively impact our environment. By eliminating carbon footprints, they offset the harmful consequences of operating their several data centers around the world.
By choosing them as your hosting partner, you can sleep well at night knowing that you are not causing any chances of Global warming due to improper server management practices. Ultrahosting optimizes their data centers regularly to reduce power consumptions and increase efficiency. They are an environmentally responsible organization that constantly looks for methods to improve their daily operations such as to reduce any further harmful consequence to our planet earth.
What is Carbon Footprint?
Carbon footprints are measured in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels for energy generation. Everyone in this world takes part in this process. This is a completely unavoidable process for our lives to sustain. All that we can do it to reduce it to a maximum extent.
There are several ways how the IT industry produces carbon footprints. Few of them are running servers, workstations, personal computers, etc. It gets worse when they don’t switch off the devices when not in use. It is also not advisable to use old servers or un-optimized servers.
Ultrahosting.com has taken several steps in identifying the factors contributing to carbon footprints, and has implemented systems to nullify the effect and to completely avoid them. They also are buying new technologies that aid them to reduce carbon footprints, reduce power consumption and enhance efficiency.
Their data optimization strategy focuses on converging their resources such as servers, data centers, networks, storage devices, business applications and other infrastructure products. Through these continuous efforts and collaboration with CarbonFund.org, they demonstrate their intention to not only provide value to businesses, but also ensure that our future is safe. They set an example to others in the same niche to start taking small steps to avoid global warming.
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Shared Vs Dedicated Hosting
As a freelance Linux System Administrator, my clients sometimes ask me, “what is better- dedicated or shared hosting?”. The answer to this question depends on many factors, most of which are client specific. Simply put, what is best for one client may not be best for another client. In this short article, I will compare and contrast these two popular hosting types, and show the benefits and disadvantages of both hosting types.
Shared hosting is widely used today by many websites- and for a few good reasons. A shared hosting provider is a provider that hosts your website along with several other websites, all on the same IP address. This IP address is shared among all of the websites in the server- which can be a major problem. Most search engines today blacklist, or ban, IP addresses of malicious or misbehaving servers- not the domain names. What this means is that if another website that is hosted on the same server, and is malicious or distributes spam, that your website could potentially be blacklisted as well. With dedicated hosting, you don’t have to worry about this same issue. Often, you can assign several IP addresses to your dedicated server, which will appear to search engines such as Google as separate servers.
In addition to security issues, shared hosting servers tend to be the slowest form of hosting. This is a matter of logistics- if you split the same connection among several hundred websites, there is going to be a performance impact. In addition, if a CGI or PHP script is written incorrectly by another website owner on the same server, it can slow down the performance of your website as well. However, with a dedicated server, your server will have a direct connection to the hosting provider’s Internet gateway which will not be shared with other websites. In addition to this, your server will also have only the workload that you give it- if you use only a few CGI or PHP scripts, your server will run perfectly fast.
The main advantage to running your own server is that you are responsible for security and maintenance updates, as well as backups. I cannot remember how many times a hosting provider has deployed an update (which went horribly wrong), and restored the server without even contacting the client. In many cases, the client had to contact the hosting provider to ask what happened before the hosting provider even admitted to any error. Placing this responsibility in your hands allows you to ensure that all updates are installed, and that system backups are religiously followed.
In addition, with a dedicated hosting account, you can also easily install extra server software if needed. If you want to try out a new Apache module, you have the freedom to install that software to try it out. Try doing that with a shared hosting provider! Simply put, shared hosting providers typically do not install extra software on their server without an act of congress!
Which ever hosting plan you decide to go with is your choice to make. However, the general recommendation that I make is this: if you plan on making money with your website, the only logical choice is a dedicated server. Given the reliability and speed differences, you simply cannot risk the profitability of a website with shared hosting. Simply put, the extra money saved per month will be lost if you lose a client or customer!
What is the Definition of Web Hosting – What a Web Host Does and How to Choose a Good One
If you are new to the wonderful world of websites, you may have come across the term web hosting, but perhaps not fully understand what it is. Every website needs a web host in order for it to be available online for visitors to see it. If you create a website, you can do this on your own computer at home, but if you want it to be seen on the internet you have to upload it to a server, which is a powerful computer where all your web pages are stored. From here anyone with your website address can find it and view your pages. The company who provide the server for you are your web host.
Web hosting is a specialist business that involves the provision of computer space where people can pay to have their websites stored. As well as the basic storage of web pages, the web host has to enable your pages and files to be downloaded by visitors to your site. This service is known as the provision of ‘bandwidth’. Whenever someone views a page on your website, they are downloading the information stored on the web host’s server, so there is a transfer of data. Bandwidth is just a measure of data transfer over a certain period of time.
There is a direct cost involved in both storing your pages and allowing them to be downloaded, so web hosts will charge you based on how much storage and data transfer you require. If you look at the various packages available on any web hosting site, you will see that there are normally different options which include varying amounts of ‘disc space’ (storage) and ‘bandwidth’ (data transfer).
You will select the most appropriate disc space allocation based on how big your site is likely to be. The more pages and files you have the more disc space you will need to store it. Certain file types, such as images, take up a lot more storage space than others. You choose how much bandwidth you need based on how busy you expect your site to be, and what type of data is going to be downloaded. For example, if you have a website that contains lots of video files, that is going to require a lot of bandwidth.
When looking for a web hosting company, you will obviously need to check what packages are available and look for an appropriate level of bandwidth and disc space, but there are other important considerations too. The most important of these is how reliable the web host is in terms of keeping websites online and in dealing with queries and technical problems. With any web host you are going to have to contact their support staff, even if just to answer questions or queries, and how good this service is can make all the difference to your experience. An unreliable host could leave you with your website frequently off-line and no quick answers or solutions when you ask for help.
The best way to check out the reliability of hosting companies is to seek reviews or recommendations based on previous customer experience. Whatever they say they will do for you counts as nothing compared to what an existing customer tells you they have actually done.