The concept of unlimited disk space is something that I am not able to understand, and would appreciate if anyone could help me understanding it.
I see many giant hosting companies offer unlimited disk space with their shared plans.
But if you actually try to upload that much data, they will ask you to not use your account for file storage. What does that mean? I am really not sure..
Say if I have a movie website which has many movie files large in size. My website offers those files for download or streaming. Does that mean the disk space for my files will be considered as to be used for file storage?
Just not able to get the entire concept. If you cannot store files, then how can someone use unlimited disk space?
There is a host I am not going to name which has ~30 servers and 50,000+ customers.
Isn´t that quite a large customer base for the number of servers? They also have an unmetered plan. The normal plan is pretty generous at 200gig storage 2,5 TB transfer. I guess if someone actually uses this they´ll be shut down. Or if they even use close to 1TB they will probably bust the CPU.
Is it common for VPS's to be oversold? I'm currently torn between paying a little bit extra for a dedicated, giving me the piece of mind that I'm the only one on the server, and getting a cheaper VPS.
I'm looking for a VPS/dedi for a new project I'm working on that requires a quite specific set up that isn't feasible with shared hosting. The problem is that I don't think I need the full power of dedicated server.
Can you recommend a company that's been in the business for a while and isn't likely to go away? One that provides what it promises?
I'm looking to spend no more that $40 a month on an unmanaged service. I need at most 300GB of transfer a month and 10GB of space is plently (all I really need is the OS install plus a GB or two).
i have a question about overselling, if i offer 999999gb's of diskspace for $1/mo, you say i am overselling, and its a bad thing, right? well does that mean medialayer oversells because they can't truly offer unlimited mysql databases, can they? eventually, just creating databases thousands of times will consume diskspace?
Just how it actually works? I have a pretty good knowledge about Xen and Linux KVM (somewhat about VMware as well). Prior to joining WHT, I rarely heard about Virtuozzo and OpenVZ.
I'm just interested in RAM usage actually. I also read on some threads that you can oversell storage and net bandwidth as well? That just seems a little weird to me. I also used a fairly good amount of Solaris Zones as well.
Example, if I have a 8GB box and I leave some, say 512MB, reserved for CT0. 8192-512=7680 (I know the ACTUAL RAM amount will NOT be 8192), that leaves 7680MB use for CTs. So technically in OpenVZ if you dice out dedicated 512MB VEs... you end up with 15 right?
So you are able to sell more than 15 VPSs on a 8GB server box? If also set all burstable RAM to 1GB for all VEs.
In Xen, when you set dedicated RAM it is taken away from dom0, period. That's all there is to it, no oversell (Xen 3.3+ you can use ballooning to overcommit RAM, I know). Within CT in VZ, user is able to check beancounters to see the guaranteed/burstable RAM. Technically you can't lie to the users.
I researched around... when oversell in VZ and the RAM gets maxed out... VZ will try to slow/stop/kill processes in order to keep the guests happy, to me that's just dangerous. Why needs to kill processes for RAM saturation?
Anyone can shed some lights for me? Or point me to an article(s). It can be technical, I should be able to grasp.
I had a quick question regarding bandwidth. I am currently with a provider that supposedly offers 10,000 GB of monthly transfer and my monthly fee is $229/month (core2quad server).
I wanted to know how can they possibly offer that much bandwidth for that monthly fee? Is that normal?
This is about a sustained 30 MBPS usage throughout the month to make it 10,000 GB at the end of the month.
Are you telling me they will let me use 30 MBPS of bandwidth sustained for that monthly fee?
Bandwidth costs has come down but they have multiple providers and even if they do have huge bandwidth contracts, the cost has to be around $5 - $6 a MBPS per month for them. That is excluding the other providers and all other network costs.
so JUST for me, it means they will pay about $180 a month just to cover my bandwidth expenses, then there is electricity, server costs etc...
Is this overselling? If I approach this limit, do you think they will find a reason to kick me out?
The funny thing about this "yet another" overselling thread is that my host, Siteground.com, is an active over seller, and even though I don't like it, this is now way of life.
The hosting industry has changed in the past few years. In the quest for success, for more clients and more profits, the larger hosting companies have made sure the hosting world has changed, and has changed for the worse (both for customers and companies). Why did it happened?
Back in 2004/5 hosts used to offer moderate packages containing 1GB of space (a lot) with some traffic. Then, came ego powered web hosts such as Bluehost, came with the answer of the ever important question - "How can we drive more signups our way?" - the answer as simple, genius, and yet destructive - recruit affiliates! Affiliates want money, and money were being offered, a lot of them (65USD per sale I think).
Every miracle lasts for three days - what happened next:
hint: type "web hosting" in google and check out the directories on the top positions So, people started copying the idea, and recruiting affiliates, and the web hosting directories were born. Now everybody is in the directory, and the highest bidder was on the Number one position, the BEST HOST!, well, the one who pays most...when you are first, there is always someone who is willing to pay more, so the first company outbid the N1 host, then the second outbid the first, so quickly afiliate prices jumped from the 50-70 range a few years ago to the 150-200 bucks per new client today.
That is crazy, you are paying affiliates 2-3 years worth of revenue, just to have the client. But what does this have to do with OVERSELLING? Everything!
Now that you are in the directory, and can't pay more (you will never make any money...), you have to be different than the other companies in the directory. How - invest in new technology? better customer service? money? oops, they were spend already by the marketing department. So, the only thing that you can do is to raize features.
The first company raized the features to 20GB space/200GB Traffic, then the next one came with 50/500, then somebody else came with 300/3000, then companies like ours came and said, ok, if you can offer 300GB of space, sure we can offer 600GB of space And then yahoo came, and did it - "we promise you the world" - unlimited space, unlimited traffic - what a rubbish - there is no such thing as unlimited, unmettered maybe, unlimited - just ask them about their bandwidth cap - they have one, don't they?
If you google the directories on "web hosting" you will note that everybody offers unlimited space/traffic. But how can you be now different now? - of course, invest in technology...oops, no money, sorry. Then again someone came up with the idea to offer to host more domains per one account - and now we are different! Here you can host 5 domains, elsewhere, only one, everybody will signup from us! Aleluia! oops, three days later, everybody was offering unlimited domains, and nothing changed the equilibrium.
You though it was all over, wrong! Then came Sept 2008 around, and the Bluehost ego struck again - what can we do to attract more customers - sure, lets dump the prices - 7.95/mo was now 4.95/mo, surely no one can else can charge 4.95/mo, give unlimited features, domains, and pay 200 bucks per new client. Of course this is true, at least for the first 3 days, then everybody lowered their prices.
The end result: everybody has the same equal share of the market, and everybody is making a lot less profit (if any) than before. On the other side, the customer is now used to shop for the biggest features at the lowest price, without really knowing how to understand difference between a quality service and an affiliate "you pay a lot and don't get anything in return" hosting service.
I've seen in previous threads people to immediately jump and start saying that overselling is bad - that is true and yet not true - it depends whether you are a host or a customer:
Customers: + cheaper than before, much cheaper than what it should be + features, if you need to use more features, you have a deal + competition will drive quality/innovation forward - 90%+ of all overselling hosts spend their money on advertising, and you get no service at all
I would never buy a hosting from a company that relies exclusively on affiliate marketing - they don't focus on quality, they can't offer reliability (no money for new servers, no money for softwares etc), and the worst off all, they educate the customer with bad habits and of course, drive them away from the hosting business. Up to now, this was not a problem, as even though many people opt out of building and managing personal websites, newcomers compensated. However, recent stats show that the growth of the US hosting users has grown with less than 0.4% over the last 12 months, and with the economic slowdown, more people are opting out each month.
Overselling by itself is not a problem - it is true that most customers would never hit the limits (even though most of the time they are invisible) - hosting overselling is just like any other industry overselling (phone, electricity, airlines etc). There is only one BUT here - even though it is unlikely that most people would consume a large share of resources - can you provide service to those customers who would actually need the features? - I think the answer is yes at least this is true if you are a large host with a lot of infrastructure.
Of course, what will happen if everybody start using all the resources. What will happen if the Chinese stop eating rise and start consuming meat?
Compare to others its alot. But they better not be overselling reseller accounts. Specially with overselling enabled it will be impossible to live up to it if they are overselling.
I'm willing to pay a bit more for a host that oversells to a lesser degree. I used "IP Neighbors" to find out how many sites were on a couple shared-server hosts.
I currently have two websites on different hosts. One shows 71 urls on the same IP. The other shows 670! The one that shows 71 is quite a bit more expensive, but I'm wondering if all servers hold similar amounts or if the number is not that relevant. I'm also guessing that since some websites are huge and get lots of hits, while others do not, simply looking at numbers may not be much help.
Can anyone give a good guideline on how to judge this? Simply looking at reveiws doesn't seem to be of much help. I find that the webhost having 670 urls on a server getting praise for fast loading, while I find it much slower than what I'd like. Lots of reviews are coming from people without a perspective on the possibilities. It's fairly easy to judge webhosts on service. There are plenty of relevant comments on this. Judging the network and the degree of overselling has been much more difficult for me.
I have a Linux-2 512MB VPS with TekTonic and when I was ona 256MB UM1 plan I would experience daily frequent slow-downs that would last around 1 or 2 minutes, just enough for my software server to timeout and disconnect users. It wouldn't be downtime, it just would take 2 minutes for the SSH login message to appear and the website and lag was unbearable.
I was in the process of looking for a better VPS when they started to offer their new Metered plans at a new place with new servers, I switched to test it out and I no longer had the slow-downs for about a month.
Starting around end May, I would begin to experience the same type of slow-downs. As days continued the slow-downs kept getting worse and worse. Eventually around mid June after 5 support tickets of my problems, they finally admitted that "The host was swapping" and they said they would double RAM for the Node.
After a few days things did begin to die down for about 10 days, and then things started happening again, gradually more and more slowly. I have submitted about 5 tickets from June to now, their common response is that "It's working fine now" which is true, because the slow-downs only last about a minute or two, and I can never get to support in time for them to investigate. Just yesterday they admitted "The host was swapping" and they said they would double the RAM, sound familiar?
Can anyone explain to me what might be the problem? Is it common for VPS providers to need to double the RAM every month or 2? or are they overselling of resources?
Is it common for a VPS to get slow-downs like this a few times a day? If so, Its seeming clear to me that because of my sensitive software that restarts itself after a 30 second timeout or slowdown, I should look into more dedicated options rather than VPS.
just want to share some negative experience with bluehost, thoughts on overselling, and to ask for an advice on what hosting to move to ... Bluehost.
Here's what is going on on the server box that I have an account on. I can see this via the ssh account that bluehost gave me.
The box is 8 CPUs, with average load about 15-25%, though sometimes it goes up to 70. It's got about 700G of space for the users. There are 26 registered users (including myself), but these are only those who have asked for ssh access; since I guess not everybody asks, there just as well may be another 100 or so users.
Now, bluehost offers 1.5TB (or is it 15TB?) storage. Since we've got 0.7TB for at least 26 of us, the conclusion is obvious: nobody can get the promised amount.
Now this is where the problem begins. Apparently one of the users of the box has attempted to make good of the 1.5TB promise; as a result the box ran out of space.
The consequences you can imagine.
The consequences for all of the users of the box - not only for the one who made it run out of space. I was actually using only a couple of gigs, and when the box went full my accounts started loosing emails, my cpanel was shut down and so on.
To add up to the trouble, bluehost didn't react until I (and perhaps others) complained. And when the support did pay attention to the problem, it was only to add some 20-30G (may be they just cleaned up something, I can't say).
Overselling.
Now it becomes clear to me that overselling is a problem not only for those who try to actually use the promised amount of space and bandwidth, but to everybody. Moreover, if a single user tries to use all his space it already leads to troubles.
I was imagining before that these providers have huge servers, so that if one actually uses his 1.5TB others won't notice - it's only if many try to do this there's a problem. How very naive. Indeed it's hard to imagine a single server box on which somebody using 1.5TB could pass unnoticed. As it happens with bluehost, a server can't accommodate even one such user.
Finally, I'm in need of recommendations.
I'm looking for a hosting to move to. In fact I only have a couple of static websites with about 20 emails on them. However, it appears to be not such an easy task to find a reasonable host. The point is that I like to have at least 2-3G of space- so that I wouldn't need to delete any emails and worry about the space in general. What is on offer, however, is either 200M for smth like 7$/month, or these unlimited TB from oversellers. Somehow there seem to be nothing in between. Thus what I need is perhaps a moderate overseller. One who can't allow everybody to use all their space at the same time, but can tolerate reasonably expectable increases of usage.
In short: is there a hosting provider that can give me: 3G space, 2 domains allowed to host, ~3G bandwidth a month, 30 or so emails. And all this for 5-8$?
I recently got a VPS from VPSLand before reading all the negative reviews... Everything seems to work fine EXCEPT disk operations. Sometimes it seems writing big files to disk, or moving/copying files around on the server will completely lock it up.
I opened up PerfMon and with my IIS/mySQL services stopped (which means my system is running absolutely nothing), the disk queue and disk % values are ridiculous. See:
www|europeinruins|com/temp/disk-noiis-nomysql.JPG (can't post URL's so switch the | with .
I am owner of a web hosting company with a plan with overselling and I see plenty of criticism lately for resources that we offer.
In the country where we work, offer such a plan has allowed us to grow our business and invest in infrastructure that other web hosting companies can not afford. We have a large number of servers (Dell 2950, Xeon Octo Core, +8GB, Large RAID 10, ISCSI remote backups) and a network increasingly large/quick.
In addition we have highly qualified technical staff and technical support 24/7.
All this (managed correctly) allows us to accommodate all types of customers even if they have a relatively high use of resources. In conclusion, our customers are generally very satisfied.
Can someone recommend a good overseller? I have 300GB+ in home videos I want to back up online somewhere. My plan is to just leave a crappy computer of mine uploading non-stop for like a week or whatever.
All I really need is a place that oversells but won't give me crap for actually using the space I pay for, and fast upload speeds would be nice too. Oh, and cheap is definitely good and I don't like it when hosts put up advertisements on my error pages. Nothing else really matters to me that much.
Out of curiosity, anyone have some stats or more information regarding the 1and1 shared hosting backend? (raid setup, how they "load balance" users across servers, ...)
They seem to use boxes with 4GB of rams, quad 1.6ghz intel processor (xeon 5110), 3.2TB of hdd (90% full). Looking at the /home/ it seem to host more than 10k accounts!
I'm interested in creating a small website exposing the biggest overselling companies, and how their overselling practices are false marketing.
Simply put, I want to benchmark each host with exact tests for accuracy. Any idea how I can fairly test each host, e.g. benchmark?
After the tests have been performed, I will explain which are the worst hosts (e.g. the first to give me the boot due to some TOS clause, e.g. cpu usage), etc.
Also, would anyone like to help out with this project? I'll be putting some nice marketing into it.
We like to enable "Overselling Allowed" setting to our resellers, so we tested with creating test reseller account.
Here is what we did
Domain.com(main domain of “reseller”) with reseller user name "reseller" and set resource limit under this reseller account, 4000MB diskspace and 607MB bandwidth with "Overselling Allowed" checked. And assigned 3000MB diskspace and 30GB bandwidth to domain.com
And downloaded dummy files from this domain.com and it went over 700MB bandwidth and waited until bandwidth statistic is updated... and now..
even it's over 607MB bandwidth, this account/domain is still able to load...it suppose to show "bandwidth exceed" page, right? And it worked when we tested cpanel(individual) account.
Also after exceed the bandwidth when we tried to create account under this reseller account by login as "reseller", it still allow us to create account even "Create a New Account" page shows that bandwidth is exceed....
I'm trying to find at least three web hosting companies to choose from to host a Joomla websites on a shared server. Would consider dedicated if the deal was right. I have a friend of mine who wants to create a church website, and is looking for the best deal. I use Netfirms which I have never had an issue with, but I didn't want to be bias, and would like give him other options to choose from.
Is there a good WebHosting Review site, I could check out, or maybe someone could recommend their top three. I reading threw the forums here and I noticed there are not that many complaints with Hostgator. Again, I just want to see if there was anything out there better.
Lets say you're a customer looking for web hosting, but do have technical experience - you know, you develop your own websites, you've had experience in this sort of thing before.
What if you came across a provider who seemed to offer a good service, they're high quality, they can host your website on their brilliant setup etc... but they do not provide any e-mail accounts with your hosting?
We're developing our own shared hosting setup, our own control panel too. Regardless of the control panel though, we wouldn't feel comfortable hosting peoples e-mail. We have plenty of experience in every other aspect of general shared hosting - but not looking after e-mail accounts nor the associated software.
To be honest I don't think that many shared hosting providers truely handle e-mail properly, and that job should really be left to the professionals.
We could of course guide customers or potential customers on why we won't offer e-mail accounts (i.e. not wanting to offer something we know we can't provide to a high enough standard) and instruct them on how to setup e-mail with another provider (such as Google, who will do this for free with limitations).
The alternative to the above is that we mask in a third party to look after e-mail, i.e. resell someone elses e-mail services as part of our hosting packages. The third party would require API access to setup/remove accounts..
What do you think? Are we just acting stupid trying to provide web hosting without e-mail hosting included? I noticed a while back Dreamhost encouraged their customers to use an alternative e-mail provider!
I have about 5 sites all hosted on my same hosting account. One of those domains is attached to the hosting account. I place my other domains in a folder of a sub-directory of my main domain. This has been working fine, up until today when i noticed a weird error. I give you a little example of how my sites are setup
my main domain: www.maindomain.com
My other sites hosted in a sub-directory of my main domain: www.maindomain.com/sites/site2/ www.maindomain.com/sites/site3/
How my other sites appear on the web: www.site2.com www.site3.com
This works fine for every page until i go to www.site2.com/index.php It redirects to www.maindomain.com/sites/site2/index.php for some reason
This question gets asked a lot in our Helpdesk and I figured I would post our knowledgebase article here to help anyone else wondering the Pros and Cons of Unlimited Domain Shared Hosting vs. Reseller Hosting. If anyone has anything else to add, I appreciate any feedback on how we can improve our KB article.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Given the present state of shared hosting, many clients may ask "Why would I need a Reseller account if I can host unlimited Addon and Parked domains within a single shared hosting account?". There is certainly enough Disk Space and Bandwidth provided in many of today's hosting packages, so why bother to purchase a Reseller account?
Many don't realize the drawbacks of hosting large numbers of domains within a single hosting account until they've already packed tens of them onto a single package.
So how do you know whether a Reseller account or Shared Hosting account is right for you? The answer is in how you plan to provide access to others and how "mission-critical" the sites are. You should consider the following factors when deciding on hosting a large number of domains:
1. Who will be managing these sites?
2. How important is site security between sites?
3. Will these domains need dedicated SSLs?
4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?
In a nutshell, Reseller plans are for those who wish to host websites for other sub-clients and a shared hosting package is for a single individual managing multiple personal domains. We'll go over the 4 points above in greater detail.
1. Who will be managing these site?
If you personally own multiple domains and wish to host them within the same hosting space, you can easily do so with an Addon or Parked domain. An addon domain will allow you to host a new domain within a subdirectory of your hosting space. A parked domain will allow you to have multiple domain names point to the same content. Since addon domains reside within the same user space as your main domain, you can manage all of your domains with a single login. You can see the problem if you want to provide another user with access. Since all accounts are managed with a single set of login credentials, if you give another user access to their addon domain you are also giving them access to your main domain. If you have vital information stored on your main domain and you are hosting another domain as an addon domain for someone else, you cannot provide them access to their hosting without compromising the integrity of your main domain.
When hosting sites as a Reseller, your clients in turn will want access to their account and will want exclusive rights to their disk space and server resources. With a Reseller account, each sub-account you create gets its own username, password, and isolated user space on the server. Individual clients of yours have access to their user space and their user space alone. In addition to the isolation with regards to access concerns, each account also gets their own cPanel access. All of the same great features that you use to manage your sites can also be given to your clients. Next time client Y wants to add an email account, you don't have to do it for them for fear of giving them access to your cPanel, you can simply give them their login details and they can manage their own email accounts.
2. How important is site security between sites?
This is along the same lines as point 1. This is not necessarily related to who you are hosting for, but what content you are hosting. Imagine that you are a webmaster and you are hosting your own personal site-in-a-box community forums (such as PHPBB or vBulliten) on your main domain and a company website for a paying client on an addon domain. It is not uncommon for popular scripts to have security flaws in older versions. Script authors will often update security flaws in later versions of their software. For this reason, it is very important to keep scripts up to date on your site. But let's assume you forget to update your scripts for a couple of months and an unscrupulous individual takes advantage of a well known security hole. Using this exploit, they gain access to your forums and any subdirectories. Since you are hosting another domain as an addon, they now have access to this domain's content as well. A site defacement on this company's site may not bode well for you when they are considering you for web master services in the future.
If these two domains had been separate into two individual users (i.e. two subaccounts created through a Reseller), their content would've been inherently isolated server side by Linux's user management. Sure, your forums still would've been affected by the security hole, but the break-in would've been isolated to your site alone.
Going back to our example, let's say that instead of a corporate website as an addon domain you are hosting an image gallery site for all of your cats. In this case, it may not be a big deal if a compromise in your main domain spreads to your addon domain. After all, they are both owned by you and you're only losing some time and effort to restore these sites from your local backups (which I'm sure you've actively maintained ). But then again, you are losing time and time is money. If these sites had been separated into individual users, again, you'd only have to restore one site's content.
The idea here is isolation. Reseller plans provide you with the peace of mind to know that if one of your users doesn't keep up with their site's content as actively as they should, their actions won't negatively impact the content hosted on other domains. If you and those you host in your addons are diligent webmasters, maybe this point won't have much bearing on your decision. Only you can say for sure.
3. Will these domains need SSLs?
As of this writing, SSL certificates must have a dedicated IP address to be installed. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same shared hosting package, you can still install an SSL (or purchase a dedicated IP address and install one) but you are limited to exactly one SSL on your account. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same package (and consequently the same IP), you must choose which domains gets to have the dedicated SSL.
Sub accounts of Resellers can each be placed onto separate IP addresses and, as a result, can each have their own dedicated SSL installed.
Of course, both shared accounts and Resellers' sub accounts can use the server's shared SSL free of charge. However, some clients prefer to see their domain in the URL bar when they visit https.
4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?
We've already established that disk space and bandwidth will be no problem. But what about CPU, RAM, and MySQL resources?
It's important to be aware of the resource needs of your website. As administrators, we have to make sure all users "play nice" on the server. We can't have user X eating all of the CPU cycles computing pi to the trillionth decimal place while you are trying to serve web pages to your loyal visitors. We have to monitor the actions of all of our users and in the event someone is stepping beyond the bounds of acceptable resource consumption, we have to take action. In most cases, this entails disabling the abusive script, but in extreme cases we have to suspend the abusive user account to prevent other domains from encountering performance degradation on their sites.
If you are hosting 100 domains as addon domains, all serving nothing but static HTML pages, maybe you will stay off the radar.
But considering most sites are more complicated than static HTML, you may want to be aware of how many sites you host as addons and what content they serve. If you're hosting the latest and greatest Joomla modules, with up to date news feeds, integrated forums modules, polls, blog posts, etc your site can certainly require a degree of CPU to serve your pages. Now imagine you have 5 or 10 of these sites all hosted as addon domains. The resources these sites need to generate their content can quickly add up and before you know it you've got a friendly email from Acenet, Inc. in your inbox wondering why your user is consuming 2 of the 8 CPU cores on the server. That may be an exaggeration, but you get the idea. In the event your resource usage becomes so excessive that we have to suspend your user, now all of your sites are down instead of whichever one may be the direct cause of the spike in CPU, RAM, or MySQL consumption.
If each of these had been separate Reseller accounts, the offending account could've been suspended temporarily while we work through the cause, leaving the rest of your domains live and kicking.
The conclusion here is that you need to be aware of the needs of your sites in a general sense. Hosting unlimited domains within a shared hosting space is certainly a nice feature. For those webmasters who have multiple presences on the web, it's very convenient to be able to manage all of their personal domains from a single control panel. For those entrepreneurs who are hosting multiple domains for other individuals, the features and security associated with a Reseller plan and the inherent isolation of Linux users is a must have. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
I'have a problem with my aps setup on sanbox.When i create on customer ccp when i click finish i have this error. I must only test.
Error: Instance of application with id 124 and version '1-4' can not be provided: There is no resource of class 'Shared hosting Apache' with provisioning attributes 'Web Cluster' in subscription with id 1.:There is no resource of class 'Physical hosting (IIS)' with provisioning attributes 'Web Cluster' in subscription with id 1..If i add the shared hosting apache resourse i get this error : There are no "apache" services that satisfy given attributes: "Web Cluster".
When I try to change hosting type to "Forwarding" it changes ok.
If I change hosting type to "Website hosting", I get message "The hosting type for "website name" was successfully changed.", but hosting plan still stay "No web hosting"....
I am developing a website for a client of mine (the client is a close friend and know's that he is getting a newbie). This site will be larger (project wise) than anything that I have ever done (everything I have done in the past has been FrontPage). We will be using several third party applications that need to run on the server as well as our own custom developed applications. We do not yet know how much access to the server's deeper structures we will need for all of the applications that we want loaded on our server to run. Things we have in mind: oscommerce, mysql, php5, apache, linux, vbulletin, blogger, phpbb, adserver, ect... Would these things run ok on a shared host and would I have full authority to configure them without needing full access to the server? Or will I need access to the entire server (dedicated server) in order to have full customization capabilities? I guess all I am trying to figure out at this point is will shared hosting for a large project limit our abilities to use 3rd party apps, or do most 3rd party application designers build their stuff to work in a shared hosting environment anyway? If we need to get a dedicated server we will, but if we can get away with shared hosting for a while (especially during development when the site will not be generating revenue) it would be nice to avoid the price of a dedicated server. Many thanks for your comments, insight, and expertise! Also, if anyone can sight some common scenarios that may require a dedicated server over a shared hosting plan, that may help me to understand what the limitations of a shared hosting plan vs. a deicated or virtual dedicated server are.