I'm very familiar with shared hosting but VPSs are a whole new ballgame. What are the top things to consider when looking for a VPS plan, just in a general sense? I figured the biggest are:
CPU
RAM
Hard Drive
OS
Control Panel
IPs included
reboots
I know with shared hosting you need pay attention to what is installed, programming, databases, etc. but how essential is that on a VPS? I know this is basic stuff. I'm very new to it, but hope to get a handle on it. Sooner or later, (probably sooner than later) I will want/need to upgrade from shared to VPS. Any other features I should keep in mind while searching?
The market is full of VPS providers with different combinations of features.. some offer huge amounts of ram, bandwidth, managed, unmanaged, etc.. The sheer number of choices is dizzying..
My question is, if you had to pick one feature of a VPS plan that was most important to you, what would it be?
This has been a topic that has been slowly developing without too much in the way of discussion. Exchange has been the killer email solution now for years - it's integration with Outlook, its sleek webmail and support for mobile devices and push email is almost unbeatable. THe only problem is your stuck in a windows environment and have killer licensing costs associated with the priveledge of using it.
We run a web hosting service down here in New Zealand where the market isn't quite as cut throat as in places like the US and that is reflected in prices. Hosted exchange accounts sit around $30NZ per month per email inbox, quite high considering our median income is around $30,000NZ.
I think this has priced the service out of the rich of small/medium sized businesses and as a result many people here don't know of or use the features which could radically improve their email experience.
<< removed >> after days of searching I came across Smartermail and its support for syncml. << removed >>
From what I see, it seems that the collaboration and integration exchange has such as in calendar/contacts/tasks is becoming standardized accross mail servers.
Do people think that in the future these features will become a standardized feature of most mail servers?
After my bad experience regarding unlimited features on this link: [url]
I tried to search some of webhosting provider tos regarding their unlimited bandwidth and space. Here one of the tos: (sorry, I hide the name).Unmetered Bandwidth Policy The purpose of the ********* unmetered bandwidth policy is to assure owners of standard operating web sites and small businesses that they will not be surprise billed for bandwidth usage. It is one less thing someone will need to worry about while hosting their web site at *********. The ********* unmetered bandwidth policy does not cover certain web sites.
These include the following:
* Web Portals/Communities/Forums - Any sites that have members and/or forums. * Online Gaming - Includes online casinos and single/multiplayer online games. * Image Galleries - Includes eBay or other online auction image dumps. * Downloads - Any site that prompts for a download or has large applets. * Audio/Video - Any streaming content, web-cams or audio/video downloads. * Chat - Includes PHP and Java chat rooms. CGI-based chat is not allowed on our servers.
If you are planning on using our servers to host one of these sites, ********* will allow for 50 GBs of transfer per month. You will be billed $10.00/10 GBs/mo thereafter.
All other accounts for personal and small business are allowed unmetered bandwidth. If you adhere to our Terms and Conditions of Use Policy and run a standard web site, you will be covered under the unmetered bandwidth policy. (99.9% of all ********* hosted web sites currently qualify for their unmetered bandwidth usage.) Accounts that do not follow our Terms and Conditions of Use policy are classified as metered bandwidth accounts and will be billed accordingly.
Unmetered Web Space Policy ********* customers are privileged to be offered unmetered web space for their sites on certain plans. ********* will start you out with 1000 MBs of space. Once you approach 90% of its use, simply request additional space from Support. ********* will then add another 1000 MBs of space, free of charge. You can continue this process until you no longer require additional space. The intent of ********* is to provide a large amount of web space to serve web documents, not an off site storage area for electronic files or a backup of your PC. Ninety Percent (90%) of your web pages (html, etc.) must be linked with files (.GIF, .JPEG, etc.) stored within your space, hosted on a ********* server.
Web sites that are found to contain either/or no html documents, a large number of unlinked files, will not be offered any additional web space under our Unmetered Web Space Policy.
Read the tos carefully, it can be tricky right? So if your the owner of webhosting provider that give unlimited bandwidth and space.. what is your TOS?
Hey, I'd be interested to hear a bit about the dedicated server features that would "turn you on" as potiential dedicated server client. What would make you go "WOW, thats cool", which features that would be indifferent to you and which ones you'd rather be with out...and why?
Thanks a lot for your input. I've listed a few options, but please feel free to post more below!
(also, just to make it clear, we (uk2group.com) does not offer all of these services, so this is not a lame attempt to spam or promote our services...)
I am having many accounts with hostgator and have been using them for almost three years now. Their prices are good and service is good also (during the recent 6-8 months).
I am looking for some alternative shared hosting service.
We will need around 15 hosting accounts on different servers, with different dedicated IPs (which should be in different C Class).
For a similar plan (baby) with hostgator, i am spending $9.95 per month. I am looking at reducing the hosting costs.
Cpanel Hosting
Dedicated IPs (in different C Class)
4-8 domains to be hosted
MYSQL and PHP with some basic modules installed
What i am looking for is a reliable company with many servers, on which they can give me
small shared accounts, to host around 4-8 low traffic websites.
i have entered in contract with a web hosting compnay and they are providing the cheapest rate.But have no good features..only they are giving 20 gb bandwidth for 15$.So is this good plan.
Please pardon the "newbie" nature of this post. (Due to circumstances outside my control, I've had management of a Windows Server 2003 VPS thrust upon me, and I'm feeling like a fish out of water!)
I have finally abandoned any hope of getting phpmailer to work with Joomla 1.0.13, so I've decided to configure the POP3/SMTP features of my server so that I can use Joomla's SMTP mail service. (Joomla's SMTP option is limited to port 25 and cannot use ssl.) Anyway, I've tried to set up my POP3 and SMTP services, but I must be doing something wrong. I have both services set up with my registered domain name -- and a check of the DNS in the SMTP setup comes back OK. However, if I try to use my domain name as my SMTP and POP servers in Outlook Express, the program times out while "looking for host." If I enter "localhost" or my IP address (numeric) as my mail servers, I get a dialog box asking me to log in. However, when I try to log in -- using my administrator name & password -- it doesn't work.
I should probably stress that I'm using SERVER 2003, not an EXCHANGE server for this. I have need for one, whole mailbox to make my stupid contact form work, which is why I'm doing this in the first place. If this doesn't work, I'm going to create my own contact form in html, throw it into a joomla content page, and use the phpmailer script to send it manually. Not ideal, as it will always go to the same mailbox, but I'm getting to the point where I DON'T CARE ANYMORE!
