As A Customer, How Much Does Design Matter
Jan 16, 2009If you're browsing for a new host, do you care about the design of the site you're looking at? Would you be put off a host if their site was poorly designed and ugly?
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Network Design / VLANs Design
Apr 9, 2008We are co-located at a datacenter and host web sites, and corporate email systems, as well as host dedicated servers for customers.
We currently have two /25 internet facing subnets from our provider. We have a Watchguard X5500e 8 port gigabit firewall that supports routing as well as VLANs. We also currently own QTY4 2848 HP Gigabit switches.
We currently have each switch connected in a loop with 2 gigabit ports trunked using static LCAP. The switches are connected as follows:
A > B
B > C
C > D
D > A
Rapid STP is turned on. One thing is - is this the ideal trunking scheme?
The more important question is this. We would like to separate ips from each other using VLANing.
IE: we might have a client with 5 different IPs in one or more subnets and we would like to group them together.
We ideally do not want to break up the subnets into smaller ones as it makes it hard to reconfigure and it wastes ip addresses, as we do not have that many.
FTP - Does Memory Matter
Jul 26, 2009include FTP Backup space for my clients, However I was thinking would memory be an issue for a few connections per day and fair usage.
I was just thinking 1-2GB memory should that be okay?
Does Location Always Matter
Jun 1, 2008I have seen a number of threads that specify location (mostly US) as a critereon for VPS selection. I am based in India and looks like there are vew VPS providers here and most of the VPS providers are located in the US (some in the UK as well).
View 5 Replies View RelatedDoes Uptime Guarantee Really Matter
Jan 13, 2009Just looking for opinions on uptime guarantees. Does anyone actually look at those guarantees anymore? Or is it just assumed that every host now a days is up 99.9% of the time.
The reason I ask is that it appears that every host has one, but I haven't really ever experienced one myself.
Does Location Of Datacenter Matter
May 18, 2009We currently have two vps's one in chicago and one in dallas. We have our primary in chicago because we figured fewer hops=faster load times for website. is this really true?
right now we get pings around 35-60ms to chicago and 60-170ms to dallas. does this major difference really amount to anything?
Does Server Location Matter For VPS
Aug 4, 2007I intend to subscribe to a VPS and I'm trying to decide whether to go with a company in the US or in my home country, Singapore (which is on the other side of the globe).
Price wise, US web hosting companies beat their Singapore counterparts hands down. The prices in Singapore are easily 2.5 times that of the US (for equivalent specs).
But in terms of server round trip times, Singapore is much faster for local users. (99% of my users will be based in Singapore.) A ping to a US server takes an average of 380ms, compared to 13ms for a ping to a Singapore server (from Singapore).
In terms of reliability, both are the same.
MY QUESTIONS:
1. Is the server round trip time really the main bottleneck (from the time the user clicks a button to the time she gets a response)? Or should I not be worried about this?
2. What is the recommended hosting option (US or Singapore), taking into consideration just two factors: price and speed?
Does Support Matter If There Was 100% Uptime And Scalability?
Dec 1, 2008Does support matter if there was 100% uptime and scalability?
Our team has been developing scalable sites since 2004. We started renting servers from Layeredtech then, since they had good reviews and they were still good until we migrated away from dedicated server land. Although we have systems administration backgrounds, it still took time away from developing software in order to administer the servers (look over logs, backups/restores, performance graphs, hardware failure, etc). Having said that, one thing I've noticed is that customers are usually happy if servers are always running and running fast.
To get rid of the systems administration part we tried Mosso (they had just released, great support but a lot of problems), we tried mediatemple's grid (also had a lot of problems), couldnt try EC2 because of persistent storage, and lastly we are currently using thegridlayer (it lags, the initial request takes about a second to display a page with no load on the server).
The next things to try were VPS then managed dedicated servers. We decided to try VPSes so we can isolate sites from each other and add VPSes as needed for specific sites. So I got a zone.net and they were running fine until they had a problem mentioned here. People recommended them because they had fast servers, now is the opposite because of this one downtime.
So finally, my questions:
1) how much do you think support is needed if your hosts provides fast servers and 100% uptime?
2) What measures do you take (if any) to verify the host's procedures such as backups, company size, profitability, etc?
3) How do you verify that a host is not overselling before buying a hosting package (assuming shared or VPS)?
Does It Matter If The Company Owns Its Equipment
Feb 29, 2008employees, owners, customers and everyone feel free to join in and tell us what you think.
Do you feel that your data is safe if the company manages their own servers? By manage I mean they fully own and operate their own hardware.
Or does it not matter as long as the company is a long time and known provider? Do you ask yourself this question when you look for a host?
Sendmail Sends From Localhost.localdomain No Matter What I Try
Dec 18, 2007I have these lines in sendmail.mc and I've compiled the sendmail.cf with them:
LOCAL_DOMAIN(`freesexdoor.com')dnl
MASQUERADE_AS(`freesexdoor.com')dnl
FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl
MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(localhost)dnl
MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(localhost.localdomain)dnl
I have the users daemon, freesexd and root in the trusted_users file. I have restarted sendmail (using service sendmail restart). I have the domains: server.freesexdoor.com, freesexdoor.com and mail.freesexdoor.com in the sendmail's local_hosts file.
In Apache 2's httpd.conf, I have this: php_admin_value sendmail_path '/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -f freesexd [at} freesexdoor.com'
Yet when I sent an e-mail with php to advertising [at} freesexdoor.com, I got these headers in the e-mail, which don't look good to a spam filter:
Received: from localhost.localdomain (IS-3293 [127.0.0.1])
by localhost.localdomain (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id
Received: (from daemon@localhost)
by localhost.localdomain (8.13.8/8.13.8/Submit) id
Message-Id: <200712180935.lBI9ZrRs005480@localhost.localdomain>
Additionally hotmail rejects my e-mails and it is obvious why. (My OpenSPF record is fine btw and on my former server I was able to send e-mails with it fine.)
Naturally I want something like "freesexdoor.com" to replace "localhost.localdomain" in those header lines. So how can I get this working?
The OS is CentOS 5 by the way.
DooptNet Design + Ben
May 13, 2009Recently we bough a design from DooptNet here @ WHT - See Original Thread
However, After several weeks of having this new design and numerous amounts of time and editing & making our site look a little more respectable, We got this weird live chat conversation with a gentleman named BEN.
This was around 7am AEST & his first sentence to start off this conversation was:
Quote:
Hi Sean, my name is Ben, and I am giving you 24 hours to remove your web site template that you have stolen otherwise I will public display that you have ripped another members template for personal use without permission of the original owner
Wow that was a bit significant to me as we bought this template from DooptNet here at WHT and the thread is located above. We paid $100 AUD/USD for this and we never stole it as it was said in the starting sentence from Ben.
Ben went on to say that:
Quote:
This topics will be displayed in the largest on-line communities on the internet, these include Web Hosting Talk, Warez-BB, wjunction and so forth.
For real right?
Ben also went on further to say that many other people have fallen for this and this is all part of a Con. I am not sure if Ben is telling the truth, But I would like some word from Sean @ DooptNet and this Ben Person.
No E-mail Address was left but - Admin@webhostingtalk.com in the Live Chat.
I asked Ben where we have ripped this site from as I would like to see it, After this Ben left the chat but before hand demanded that I remove the Stolen Content within 24hrs.
Not sure what to do from here, I have contacted Sean here at WHT and are still awaiting a response.
Network Design
Jan 12, 2007I'm designing a network that should be able to support both dedicated servers and also offer colocation (full rack and half rack). Things will be relatively small at start but the design must be able to scale. The colo area will be secured from the dedicated server area.
Right now, this is what I'm thinking:
CORE/DISTRIBUTION combined:
- Two cisco 6509's running HSRP
- Each 6509 is connected to the same two upstream ISP's via BGP (so that means 4 links in total)
- Each 6509 is connected to the access switches (described below)
- The 6509's will have a single gigabit crossconnect between them so that they can talk to each other for HSRP, iBGP, etc.
ACCESS
- Each of our racks will have an L3 switch at the top of the rack for all the servers in the rack to plug into
- there will be ~30 servers per rack
- these switches will use 4 x 1 gbit ports for trunking to the core. They will be configured in two 802.3ad link aggregation groups (ie 2 x 1gbit links per LAG group). One LAG group will connect to the first 6509, the second LAG group will connect to the second 6509.
- The default gateway on these L3 switches will be configured with the HSRP virtual IP address of the 6509's.
-spanning tree will have to be enabled to avoid loops since the two 6509's are connected directly also
QUESTIONS:
1) Each dedicated server will get 5 usable IP addresses, so I'd have to subnet my IP address space accordingly (into a bunch of /29's). This also means that I'd have to setup 1 VLAN per subnet (wich means 1 VLAN per server!). Is this a scalable design? If I have 1000 servers I'd need 1000 VLAN's! Isn't there a limit to the number of VLANS that can be created/handled by my core switches? How do larger providers do it that have thousands of servers?
2) Is this design scalable/redundant? The only single point of failure that I see is my access switch (if it dies, it could take out a rack's worth of servers). I guess I would have to live with this and would have spares on hand.
3) I'm a little confused with the interaction of BGP and HSRP. What happens, for example, if one of the links to one of the ISP's goes down on the active HSRP router? I dont want it to fail over to the inactive HSRP router, because the router is still good, its just a link that went down. Would the active HSRP router be smart enough to realize (maybe via iBGP) that the inactive HSRP router can still route to that ISP and thus just ROUTE the traffic to that inactive 6509 and then have that router send it out to the ISP? I'm assuming this traffic would travel across the 1gbit xconnect between the two 6509's so I may have to consider increasing that capacity using link aggregation aswell?
4) Which cisco switch would be good as my L3 access switch? It would have to support ~30 servers in the rack plus have at least 4x1gbit ports that I can config into two lag groups to uplink to the core.
Network Design
Sep 24, 2007I am comming across a few questions on how to do a setup for a network. I expect to have a redundant configuration similar to this:
________ISP1_______________ISP2
__________|(bgp)_____________|(bgp)
_______Router ---------BGP-------- Router
__________|_____\____ ___/_____|
__(bgp/ospf)|_________/_________|(bgp/ospf)
__________|___/___________ ___|
______L3 switch______________L3 switch
To this point (i hope the ascii diagram is understandable, i did my best on ASCII art), there are no problems. The problem comes when pluging in L2 switches. I would like them to be pluged to both L3 switches, but i don't see how to do this without HSRP or VRRP. The thing is L3 switches will also do VLAN's for the network, so HSRP would mean using 3 IP's for every VLAN and a terrible configuration mess.
I am not seeing the way to do this setup and attach a L2 switch to both L3 switches without using HSRP.
I just want redundancy for the case where one of the routers or L3 switches could fail.
Any light on this kind of setup?
Web Design And Hosting Combined
Aug 13, 2009Does anyone know any companies that offer both web design and hosting in one package? What I am thinking of would be managed shared hosting.
View 14 Replies View RelatedNetwork Design For 3 Hosts
Jan 20, 2007We just moved 3 1U's to a new colo center, from a single host in a managed facility. We need some advice on the best way to configure our topology. 2 Systems are Windows 2003, and 1 is Centos OS.
Each host has dual NICs, and we would like to configure 1 NIC for internal server to server traffic, and 1 NIC for the external Internet. We have a checkpoint VPN-1 firewall and several switches to work with.
Our current thinking is that the ALL NICs should be behind the firewall (for protection and for Qos control), and the external NICs need to be bound to the actual external IP address to avoid NAT issues with some of our Apps that can't handle NAT translation through the firewall (Asterisks VOIP using UDP for one).
Is it possible or recomended to do this? I have tried everything I can with our router to allow the external NICs to be bound to an external IP but still participate on the network behind the router to no avail.
Our other host had only 1 NIC bound to the external IP, and only the windows firewall turned on to provide firewall protection. We really dont have any real life experience configuring this type of setup,
Website Design Creation Software
Jun 14, 2008It seems there are several ways to get a website:Build it yourself using tools software
like Dreamweaver, MS Frontpage, etcHand coded using basic text editors (or combination WYSIWYG and hand coded for w3c validation)Web builders & site studio web tools provided by web hosts Templates (both original and modified)
What I am most interested in knowing is choice most people use and for the web hosts/designers out there, do you find most people favor templates and site building software over customer design?
Personally, I have found most people favor either modified templates and custom designs and find web building tools like SiteBuilder and Site Studio too limiting.
Some people seems to still like Fantastico Deluxe though.
A Good Host For Web Design Companies
Sep 3, 2008I have been with Hostgator for over 2 years and they have been great.
However, I host all my clients on my own hostgator account and I absolutely cannot stand hostgator's backend interface (cpanel). Trying to manage my SQL databases, 200+ e-mail addresses, etc via cpanel is tedious.
I am also interested in getting a VPS or something similiar.
LenoHost & Geeklayer (HunterHasting) Same Design
Dec 31, 2008I have just seen Leno Host's design And saw Hunter's work before. Is this a copy or real work?
The work LenoHost looks a little dodgy? No clue if it is or isnt.
Webpage Design When Changing Host?
Jun 1, 2008When changing host, does this affect the webpage design? I am currently with Microsoft Office Live and thinking about changing to Hostgator. If I do, is it possible to retain the existing page templates / layout?
View 14 Replies View RelatedTrusted Web Hosts For A Design / Portfolio Website
Apr 11, 2009I have almost finished designing my site and so I'm looking for a host. However, in looking for hosts I found that a lot of them were scams or were not to be trusted. There were lots of review websites that gave a top 10 listing, and the top 2 always used to be justhost and hostingmonster. Which I didn't really trust as Justhost gave me this silly thing when I tried to leave the page saying 'you can talk to a special agent to get a discount' and all that tosh.
So basically, I'm looking for a host that has a fair amount of space, preferably linux OS and preferably in the UK, and it must have MySQL support and be nice cheap one if possible, around £3.00 a month is fine.
Establishing A Relationship With A Reseller For Sites I Design
Feb 28, 2007I just design websites on the side. I've done about 10 or so and have ended up hosting them on my shared hostgator account as addon domains. I've decided to leave my current "day job" and want to try to pick up a few more web jobs in the interim.
I want to stop putting more websites in my shared account, I don't want to be a reseller and I want to be able to direct people to a host where they would get good customer service for hosting and email issues. I thought it would be nice to establish a relationship with a reseller to whom I could refer my web design clients. Ideally, it would be someone that's local (Twin Cities, MN) and I could meet in person to see if we'd work together well.
Do others do this? Does it seem to make sense to do this?
Another option would be to refer directly to hostgator. I've been happy with them but I haven't needed much in the way of customer service. Do they work well with hosting clients who don't know anything about hosting?
At some point I might want to be a reseller, but right now I want to concentrate on design and learning some new things (CMS is the next thing on my plate).
Offering Hosting As Part Of A Web Design Contract
Dec 24, 2007Are there any web designers/developers who offer hosting to their clients as part of their website creation package. I am toying with the idea of only creating websites for people who host with me. I currently have a colo server, but only use it for personal things. So I have no experience with the needs and demands of clients in regards to hosting. What are some of your experiences with hosting for clients? Is it worth it?
View 15 Replies View RelatedCredible Tube Site Design And/or Webhosting Company
Jan 15, 2009I am interested in setting up a video tube site similiar to xtube or gaytube etc but maybe at a smaller scale. Where ppl can upload clips, affiliate clips, and even have amateur clips to sell etc like what the popular gay tubes do.
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Multiple Server/Cluster Design, Setup And Maintence
Mar 13, 2008I work in a DC and am looking for a better way to deal with clients who have multiple servers hosted with us.
Heres the scenario. Client buys a server or two at the beginning, with a HW firewall or they are clustered together and require their own switch and down the road, they like what we do and want to buy more servers.
However, we've been selling other servers and the only way we would be able to accommodate them would be to run a cross connect to another cab with their new server in it. Hopefully you can see where I am going with this.
This can keep happening multiple times and with multiple clients. and eventually you can end up with spider web of cable everywhere .
My thought of doing it right but more work would be to schedule down time with a client and migrate all the HW to a new cabinet where they can grow.
Weve also been tossing around ideas like getting projected growth from clients and setting aside space for them to having dedicated cluster cabinets.
how do other DCs handle situations like this?
Web Design Business- VPS With Reseller Accounts & Transparent Client Support
Jul 29, 2007I run an established web design business, and currently host my client sites at resellerzoom.com
I offer hosting to my customers and the numbers are growing so I need to upgrade to something more robust, but keep the end-user support (my customers can get support directly from host, and they will attempt to operate without their branding)
Here are my requirements:
End user support
WHM/Cpanel preferrably (or plesk equivelant)
512 - 1GB ram
50 - 100GB monthly transfer
I have been looking at modvps.com as they are owned by Hosting Zoom, which also owns resellerzoom.com
REVIEW Absolute Design Barnsley Absolutewebdesign.co.uk Avoid Smart Merchant AVOID
Mar 3, 2009i would just like to vocalise my utter disbelief at how incompetent and dishonest Absolute Design Barnsley aka Smart Merchant aka Absolutewebdesign.co.uk have been.
Our company signed up just over a year ago to their Absolute Design Smart Merchant shopping cart website system.
To overview, this is a pay-monthly service where they host the site and we add products to the CMS style website that Absolute Design have produced.
Being a small family business we opted for this kind of pay monthly service as it would (we hoped) give us some level of support from Absolute Design Barnsley to help with the running of the site.
At first they were helpful at getting the site setup initially but months down the line and after phonecalls or online chats with Absolute Design , the result has been no action being taken as requested.
Simple things like removing the option for other currencies... I phoned in August of 2008 and was asked to email the request to Absolute Design Barnsley , which i did. Did the other currencies get removed? Nope! I phoned and emailed many times.
This year due to the economic climate we have had many price changes to do, so i phoned Absolute Design Barnsley and asked for a holding page to be put up while i changed all the prices.
I was told this would be done within the hour.
I had my doubts that this would actually happen due to past experience, and indeed a WEEK later and the holding page STILL was not up.
During this week we had several people try and buy things at the old prices and we had to cancel orders. This is obviously frustrating for us and the customers.
Due to Absolute Design 's Smart Merchant poor system i since found out i was unable to 'turn off' the shop in any way except for basically deleting the entire payment gateway setup.
Products were also still viewable at old prices via google, even if i disabled them in the CMS itself. BAD Smart Merchant !
Also in this time i managed to decide and almost fully populate a new website for our shop, it seem's Absolute Design Barnsley cannot even produce a holding page in that same space of time.
Now, you may think why didnt i just leave? Well, after that week i rang up and asked to cancel, i was asked why and i CALMLY stated my reasons, which were basically poor support.
This resulted in Andy Clegg from Absolute Design Barnsley saying to email my request to leave and he slammed down the phone.
I emailed my request to change our Domain IPS tag and contact details and within a few minutes our website had been deleted BUT Absolute Design Barnsley decided to delete the IPSTAG for the domain, basically rendering the domain useless, including our email which we use on a daily basis.
I spoke Absolute Design again on the webchat (on a friday) and asked them to change the IPStag again, they said ok, but it probably wont get done till Monday.
I was obviously doubtful as it didnt take them long to delete the IPSTAG....
Monday comes and Absolute Design still haven't changed the IPSTAG. We are shut on mondays so i rang on Tuesday and spoke to Craig. He seemed more reasonable and said he would change it shortly. Several hours later and Absolute Design Barnsley still had'nt changed our IPSTAG and were still basically holding our domain hostage.
I ring up AGAIN, speak to craig, he says hold on for a moment, about a minute later they just hung up the phone again. I ring once more and noone answers...
Instead of swift switchover to the new site, Absolute Design Barnsley have forced us to take action with Nominet to recover our domain.
This just seems ridiculous, I'm guessing Absolute Design Barnsley must be losing alot of customers but to act the way they have is just childish.
What is the point of causing so much agro just because someone wants to cancel?
I hope this post reaches anyone else who is considering taking up services with Absolute Design Barnsley aka Absolute Web Design aka Absolute Web Hosting aka Absolute Shopping Cart aka Smart Merchant and urge you to think twice!
Customer Using 172.16.253/24
Jan 17, 2007I have a consulting customer using 172.16.253/24 as public addresses for their servers.
I was under the impression 172./8 was IANA reserved space not for public use.
Assuming I am not, what is wrong with this scenario, besides the fact that they _should_ not use that IP space as public ips for their servers?
How Many Customer Actually Use 100% Of Given Bandwidth
Jun 24, 2009My question is targeted towards providers who sell unmetered bandwidth servers. Like out of 100 customers who have unmetered 10Mbps how many would actually consume full 10meg , lets keep it to peak time for now.
View 14 Replies View RelatedMDDhosting.com Customer
Jan 20, 2009I've been using shared hosting for some years now but lately found my sites were getting more and more sluggish, so I started looking around for a new host. Problem is, who do you choose? And what kind of service? I wanted something better than shared hosting but didn't fancy the complexities of VPS.
After some research I signed up for MDDhosting.com's basic Semi-Dedicated plan for one month to test them out. If it didn't work out I'd only be out twenty bucks
The set-up was fast - I was transferring my test sites within minutes of receiving their (five) instant welcome emails. When I had problems with the transfer, MDD's support team were very responsive (like, in minutes!) and when it got a bit tangled, Michael himself helped to sort it out.
After the initial issues (all my fault for setting things up wrong) the transfer of the rest of my sites was quick and painless. I'm now signed up MDDhosting's Intermediate Semi-Dedicated service.
I'm relieved, with semi-dedicated hosting, that they won't bog down over time with added subscribers. I'm impressed with MDDhosting.com's quality of service and I'm VERY happy at how fast my sites load now.
I give MDDhosting.com a ten out of ten!
Usual disclaimer: I'm not connected to MDDhosting.com in any way, other than being a happy customer. I don't normally post on forums but I was impressed by this company's service and I'm sure there are other small webmasters out there with the same kind of hosting problems I had.