Additional Competitive Advantages For Hosting Packages
Aug 11, 2008
As far as I see each hosting company uses various methods to make customers buy their domains. They can provide free domains, free Fantastico scripts, website building software, templates etc. I am planning to launch my hosting company really soon. Also I think to include free internet marketing services in some hosting packages. I am just wondering if such internet marketing program can be considered as a significant competitive advantage stimulating customers to make a purchase?
I see Site5 have a 5 dollar deal on their homepage, but I don't know if it's any good. I hear from a lot of people to get a reseller account if you plan to make a lot of websites. It's more expensive than the 5 dollar plan with less bandwidth and storage, so there got to be something to it. What are the benefits of a reseller account compared to that 5 dollar deal plan?
I know to some of you this may sound like a totally silly question. But I would like to know what the main advantages are if you have a VPS instead of a shared reseller hosting.
I notice some of the basic VPS packages give you 512MB of memory. Other than that, the rest of the stats seem to be along the lines of what you might get in an advanced reseller hosting plan such as one available from Reseller Zoom.
I am looking into VPS as a dedicated server is a little over my budget, however, I am not entirely clear what makes VPS better.
Can anyone recommend a reliable VPS or Dedicated server company that has 64/128+ IPs. My preference is a company that has the IPs on hand - without the paperwork. I'm after something with low cpu, ram, bandwidth / resource usage.
My server will be having an OS reload. I'd like to know where to find all Hosting packages made by the root and by the reseller users. How do I restore that to the newly installed OS?
how about other needed files to consider aside from the account backup?
Can anyone give me some recomendations of some traffic accounting packages?
I'm looking for something that drives the backend stats you get as a customer when you login to your Dedicated Server providers control panel. Traffic graphs / total throughput stats etc
The obvious way to do this is to ping the switch ports and generate graphs and stats using RRD tool. The other way to do it would be to mirror the external switch port and generate stats from there (this would discount 'internal' traffic between boxes, although there will be a seperate private LAN for this).
We can obviously roll our own, but to save on man hours are there any out the box packages (open source or otherwise) to generate the graphs, traffic levels and dump it all out in a nice customer friendly report (i.e not something like Cacti).
In other words, what does everyone else use...or is it a case that everyone has based the backend on mrtg / rrdtool and built their own reporting lauyer ad-hoc on top?
Does anyone know of a hosting Linux package (must be UK based) that has the usuals (PHP, MySQL, subdomains, email, Apache ModRewrite) that is geared towards hosting lots of low bandwidth sites?
I use several great hosters but they limit the amount of addon domains or charge you through the roof for extra ones. I'm thinking a package that will let me do 15 - 25 domains. More would be a bonus. The bandwidth allowance is not a problem. A lot of my customers' sites use less than 100 MB a month.
I know most webhosts run Apache and it seems to server their needs very well. However LiteSpeed is new and fast, assuming you have relatively static content. At least that's what I've heard. Beyond this, I don't know much, though a year ago I worked with a guy who hosted an iPhone software repository (smallish files, huge demand), and he put LiteSpeed on the servers to deal with the load. Running at 30+ Mbps, with spikes above 60, the server never went above 0.2 load as far as I remember, and it was just a 2GB Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86 GHz machine.
I'm setting up a new VPS, and I have the option of a number of Linux distributions to choose from. There's all the usual suspects: CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora Core, SuSE, etc. Why would I pick one over the others? I've used CentOS before, but I'm open to trying other distros. There's been lots of fuss over Ubuntu on the desktop, but why would I choose it for a server?
I've been leaning toward going with WestHost for a medium-sized project. They offer VPS without root access, though, and much of the advice in the "HOW TO: Secure and Optimize your VPS" thread requires running commands as root.
My experience has all been with colocating my own servers in a data center, with everything accessible when I log in as root (though of course I ordinarily logged in as a normal user instead). This was three or four years ago, and a lot has changed since then.
Can someone who's up on this stuff please describe the pros and cons of non-root VPS service such as WestHost provides? Cost seems to be one advantage :-} and I imagine it's wise for inexpert Webmasters not to have a completely wide-open system. Are there other pluses to non-root VPS that aren't as obvious?
Most importantly, what kind of operations will I not be able to carry out if I go with WestHost or a similar non-root VPS host? Can I reasonably expect the hosting service to perform the kind of locking-down described in WHT's tutorial on VPS security?
I'll be asking similar questions of WestHost's support people but thought it would be a good idea to ask people without a stake in either the root-access or the non-root way of doing things.
I'm starting to see this, or maybe it's always existed, but it seems like bigger sites are hosting their images on external servers. I've even seen some sites use Flickr as the host for all of their images. I guess for Flickr that means you have a guarenteed image CMS, but I really don't see that as why Flickr was created.
I'm sure there are bandwidth advantages, and maybe that's the main reason. Is there a point where the traffic gets so high that moving images off site would improve load times and sever loads? Is it a worthwhile endeavor for smaller sites? I'm curious to see what the thoughts are on this trend.
Is it possible to get a rough description of the benefits of a VPS host over a shared host?
1) Support. Should support with a VPS host be better than my current shared provider? They offer live chat and a ticketing system. Tickets can take hours to get a response, live chat minutes but often there are no support operaters to answer the question.
2) Uptime. Will uptime be improved upon? My current host tends to range from 97%-99% in a month. Importantly will it suffer from soft outages where parts of the account are down (such as MySQL or http)?
3) Traffic. What levels of traffic will base VPS packages handle? Will a few semi active forums (say max 20 users on 3 forums) be manageable alongside several PHP/MySQL galleries and several hundred normal PHP pages?
4) Load. Does the load usage of other customers on the same server effect your account in the same way it does in a shared environment? Can one user bog down the entire server for everyone else?
5) Management. How much control is given to a user in managed VPS environment. Can you restart OS yourself (and do things like edit the firewall blocks)? Do you have to keep the OS (Linux in my case) and things like Apache and PHP up to date yourself or is that done for you.
6) Usage Policies. Are the usage policies in place in a VPS environment (limiting the amount of CPU process and memory you can use). If yes are they higher than in a shared environment.
Is it possible to get a little more on a few of the hosts I've looked at (if possible I'd like to be below the $50 a month mark).
Is it a case of picking any of these and getting a similar support and hosting service?
WiredTree seems to offer a decent compromise of price against value. Given that my site is still pretty small at the moment, would the smallest JaguarPC package be a better fit (so I'm not spending money for specs I'm not using).
Unfortunately disk space is a fairly big factor as the site uses quite a few image and small video files (I'm using something like 2GB at the moment but this would increase fairly rapidly over time). Does that mean a shared host is better suited for my needs?
I have run RAID1 (software) on my server. Is it posible to disable RAID1 and use secondary 400gb H.D.D as additional H.D.D (800gb) and add another 1000gb H.D.D on my server and run RAID1 on server again? For have mirror data as RAID1 in 1000gb H.D.D
I currently manage a dedicated server to host all of our client’s websites, emails and databases.
We are now looking to purchase an additional dedicated server so we can synchronize/mirror all of our clients accounts (email, website & databases) to the 2nd server, just incase the 1st server ever went down.
The name server settings for each domain name are managed from our hosting providers own server so we can login and point each domain name to any name server we want.
So for example we have a domain say; example.com pointing to the following name servers for our 1st sever;
ns1.exampleserver1.com ns2.exampleserver1.com
Because we can add as many name servers to each domain name as we want, we would like to purchase the 2nd server from a different hosting provider which would have name servers such as the following;
ns1.exampleserver2.com ns2.exampleserver2.com
Then we want to add the following name servers to each domain name we host.
ns1.exampleserver1.com ns2.exampleserver1.com
ns1.exampleserver2.com ns2.exampleserver2.com
The 2nd server would be based at a completely different location so just incase there was a problem with the network to server 1, our clients would still have access to their email etc on server 2 because each domain would have 4 name servers.
I am under the impression that if the 1st server is down and someone types in the website address example.com, it would first look for;
ns1.exampleserver2.com ns2.exampleserver2.com
and if the 1st server was down, it would then look for ;
ns1.exampleserver2.com ns2.exampleserver2.com
which would mean our clients could still use their email, websites etc as normal because the 2nd synchronized server has all the data from the 1st server.
Am I right in thinking this is possible? And would this work?
I have added additional local IP addresses into my windows box, using advanced feature in TCP/IP properties, but it is not showing. Do I have to restart anything here?
I have a mail server which is courier, postfix, amavisd, using Mysql db and virtual mailboxes which I administer through postfixadmin.
I want to be able to add a set of default folders to all mailboxes created such as Possible Spam and some others.
I have investigated shared folders but this is not what i want, is there a way I can get courier/postfix to create a set of additional sub-folders when it creates a mailbox.
I am running WHM/cPanel (latest) and my server has 8 IP addresses. The first IP is the main shaired address but cPanel appears to only let me add one site to each of the additional IP addresses.
Is there a way I can host multiple sites on each of the additional IP’s
