Why take time to read the Web Hosting Terms of Service?
Why take time to read the Terms of Service?
As most services that we subscribe for, hosting services come with a contract. To sign-up for the service, you have to agree to the terms of that contract and sign electronically. An electronic signature is something as simple as pushing an “I agree” button and it’s just as legally bounding as if you’d put your signature on paper (although the hosting company could have a few problems in proving that it really was you pushing that button).
However, I don’t think anyone really wants to go that far as having to actually prove anything in court. It’s a lot safer to do everything in your power to avoid any legal issues.
One of the thing I should point out is the fact that many (if not most) web hosting companies have both a Terms of Service (TOS) agreement and an Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP) agreement and you agree to both when you sign-up for their services.
In those agreements, although most of them might sound like mumbo-jumbo legal stuff, there are things to look out for. Well, maybe not necessarily”look out”, but you have to make sure that you agree (or that you can live) with them.
As I was telling you in the “unlimited bandwidth” article, you can find that unlimited can be actually limited. If you can agree to that thing, then agree to it. It’s your choice.
Another thing to note is that most web hosting companies reserve the right to modify the terms as they please, sometimes stating that they can do that without sending you a notice. That’s not fair in my opinion. At least they could say they will do their best to notify you. If not, it’s just like if you were playing a game and one of the players had the power to change the rules. The simple fact that he’s changing them can be seen as a tough challenge, but if he doesn’t tell you: Hey! I changed the rules!, you’re playing the wrong game there…
I wouldn’t blame the web hosting companies though. Most of the times the terms are in strict accordance with the terms of the contracts they sign with their own service providers (connectivity, servers, etc.). It seems right for them not to promise you things that they’re not promised in the first place. That doesn’t make it right though. It is just something we have to live with.
Another thing that you should know, especially if you’re signing-up for a “shared or “virtual” hosting account, is that you are sharing the resources with the other hundreds of websites placed on the same server as your website. To protect themselves from “usage abuse”, most hosts clearly state that they reserve the right to temporarily suspend or even terminate accounts using too many resources.
So, if you have a website that for one reason of another could have usage spikes, it’s a thing that you have to take seriously into consideration. Such usage spikes can be caused by a high number of visitors over a short period of time or a script that uses a lot of CPU, memory etc. The alternative? A dedicated server! Not a cheap solution, I know!
Many web hosts do not accept anything sexual in nature on their servers. Often this is not clearly stated in any other place except the Terms of Service (TOS) agreement and/or Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP). So you have to read the Terms of Service to know this.
Another largely unclear part is the spam issue. Although it’s already clear that spam is a bad thing and most web hosting companies terminate accounts sending spam, there’s no unique definition of SPAM. Every host can and uses it’s own definition, which more often than not, is not clearly explained anywhere on their website, not even in the Terms of Service (TOS) agreement or the Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP).
Generally, if the email is 1. not sent to multiple recipients, 2. they’re not strangers and 3. you don’t advertise any services and/or products in the email, you can consider yourself safe. There are however lots of gray areas. What if you’re sending an email to a company proposing a business deal. Is that spam? It’s up to the hosting company to decide. And it’s hard for them to stand by you and support you in such a situation, because the person complaining about being spammed could go to one of the host’s providers and tell the whole story.
If that provider sees your email as spam, the web hosting company could lose it’s business because that provider might terminate the contract. And so on with the providers of the provider. This is why hosts tend to delete accounts accused of spamming (even in the gray areas). Why should they risk everything for a single client?
It’s really an unpleasant situation for everyone involved in it. Unfortunately, you have little chances of winning. The first time you might get away with a fine or a temporary deactivation of the site (so that you’ll learn better), but the second is usually final. You’ll have to look for another host if not worse.
Many web hosting companies guarantee a certain uptime (usually 99.9% or more). That might seem OK first, but when you read the Terms of Service, the things can change quite significantly. You can find out that the time when they make upgrades (hardware or software) or anything like that “to assure the best possible service” , does not constitute downtime. Or you might find out that you’ll simply not be billed for the time when the server was down. So if you pay $30 per month for hosting, and your website was down for 10 days, you’ll only pay $20. That sure sounds like a joke to me! But it isn’t!
Another thing that I’ve seen is a “strange” definition of downtime: downtime shall constitute any period of time longer than X minutes (usually more than 5 minutes). So, if your website is down 4 minutes, then it works for 1 minute and so on, you don’t experience downtime. Funny! Really funny!
A nice example that made history, are the Terms of Service of web hosting companies offering free hosting. The Terms of Service stated that everything that the user uploaded on their servers became their property (they claimed the copyright). Although I never heard of a web hosting company actually enforcing this term, it sure shows what can be found in the Terms of Service of serious (meaning big) companies. The public was outraged and the Terms of Service were silently changed, removing the contentious parts.
I gave you these examples to show you why it’s a very good thing to actually read the Terms of Service (TOS) agreement and the Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP) when signing-up for a web hosting service. I will not tell you in this article how a certain term should sound like. Just make sure it’s something you agree with. Oh! And read the TOS and AUP before you sign-up, NOT after.
http://www.whreviews.com
Overselling – what the buyer (you) should know about
Overselling – what the buyer (you) should know about it
Overselling basically means to sell beyond the means of delivery. However, that’s a little bit oversimplified. Maybe an example will help you get a clearer picture.
A web hosting company might have a server with a 80 GB hard drive and 700 GB bandwidth. The company starts to sell plans with 1GB space and 10GB transfer quota. After selling 70 plans the bandwidth allocated for those 70 clients reaches the limit of 700GB. However, the web hosting company notices that each month only 275-300 GB of bandwidth are “consumed” by the clients hosted on that server.
It decides then to sell more accounts – over the 700 GB limit of bandwidth. After selling another 10 plans and hosting those websites on that same server, the allocated space totals 80 GB. However, the company notices that only about 40 GB of space were used by the customers over the last 6 months. The bandwidth consumption increased as expected at about 325-350 GB per month. So it seems there would be no problem to host another 10 or even 20 customers on that server.
Since the cost for the server is constant, every added plan could be easily seen as pure profit. Anyway you look at it, they were able to get more money from that same server. The only problem would be if all their customers would all of a sudden consume all the bandwidth and the space that they were allocated. The server would not have the space (solution: add another hard drive) and the company would have to pay at a higher-than-usual rate for the bandwidth consumed over the 700 GB that were initially allocated by their provider.
If by now you start to see this overselling practice as unfair, I have to point you to another “real life” example: telecommunications companies. They have millions of customers, but if all (or just too many) of their customers would decide to use the phone at the same time, they would not be able to give them all the service they have paid for. I don’t know about you, but where I live, the New Year’s Eve is a time when the lines get very busy. So busy in fact that it becomes very hard if not impossible to get the tone. You’re basically cutoff.
Overselling however, keeps prices at low rates. If there would be no overselling, few of us would have phones and those who would have, would pay some hefty fees to use them.
Even the bandwidth providers oversell. My point so far is that overselling is not necessarily a good thing, but it’s not necessarily bad either. The only problem is that is has to be done right, with careful planning.
Now, getting back to the hosting business, I can assure you that you’ll rarely see web hosting companies willingly admitting on their website that they oversell. The reason is that overselling in the web hosting business has been abused in the past and is still abused of by many companies.
There are people (even in the web hosting business) who see overselling as bad as “unlimited bandwidth” or even worse. These are often the ones that do not oversell at all and they feel very strongly that they’re right about this matter. Unfortunately they forget that they are overselling too.
Yes, they are overselling because their upstream oversells. If the upstream oversells, their bandwidth quota is oversold, so if they were given the right to use 700 GB of bandwidth, the upstream in fact estimated that they would use lets say 600 GB. So, if that hosting company promises a total of 700GB, it is in fact overselling.
Now the bad part of overselling is that it’s being abused by hosts who don’t know what they’re doing. Often the host assumes that it’s bandwidth and space that it sells. But that’s not all it sells! That kind of host thinks that as long as it provides bandwidth and space (and sometimes support ) everything will be OK. If that’s the plan, the host risks to lose everything because a server is more than space and bandwidth.
When the host plans how many websites to host on a website, the first limit is the processing power of the processor (combined with memory usage, maximum transfer speed etc.). What I’m saying is that although on paper the server might host even lets say 300 websites, in reality that’s not always possible. If the websites are all busy forums or use databases and scripts (SSI, PHP, PERL etc.) the computing power of the machine might be exceeded long before reaching the bandwidth limit (a too high server load). In fact this might happen even if the company was not overselling.
This is why very often the host will close accounts before they reach their bandwidth limit. Not because of bandwidth consumption, but because of overuse of other resources.
Conclusion: overselling should be done only when it’s possible. It is often a server by server thing, depending on the processor (computing power) and the actual websites that are hosted.
Because the vast majority of web hosting companies to do not state that they are overselling you have to figure this out on your own. The few hosts that mention the word overselling are usually the ones that are not overselling. They are very proud of it and they’ve realized that they could use this policy to their advantage. Remember that they are in fact full-selling resources that are oversold by their upstream. So they’re not overselling themselves, but the fact is that they are overselling.
To conclude, overselling is OK if it’s being done carefully and based on experience. So I would not rule out companies that are overselling as long as they do it right. Searching for “non-overselling” web hosting companies would also make it very hard to find a host.
Because usually it’s bandwidth that is oversold and because most of the costs are bandwidth related, you can get an idea on how much it is oversold by looking at the price per GB of bandwidth ratio. From what I’ve read, if the ratio goes under $0.40/GB over-overselling might be right term for their practice. So I would try to select companies with prices over $0.40/GB of bandwidth, but this rule is not set in stone.
As long as the servers are powerful (something like dual Xeon) and the customer reviews do not reveal any problems, you should most likely be fine. You may even ask some of those customers for some inside information such as average server load, highest server load etc.
I hope this article helped you in making a good decision. Whatever you do, try to stay under your plan’s bandwidth limit. It’s always good to play it safe. And if you have a script based website, ask the host about resources limitations and account cancellations/suspensions for resources abuse.
http://www.whreviews.com
Server load – just a number?
Server load – just a number?
Well, yes, basically the server load is a number. The number is usually under the x.xx format and can have values starting from 0.00. The number expresses how may processes are waiting in the queue to access the processor(s). Of course, this is calculated for a certain period of time and of course, the smaller the number, the better. A high number is often associated with a decrease in the performance of the server.
You can usually find the server load value in the control panel associated with your web hosting account under “Server Status”. There you’ll find listed a server load value. If you refresh the page, you’ll notice that the value changes almost everytime. That’s because it’s and instantly calculated value. However, one can notice over a period of time which are the usual values of the server load.
Knowing what the value of the server load is not very important though. Knowing how to interpret the value is what counts. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of debate on how to actually interpret it, even among web hosting company owners.
One thing is sure however: all of them consider a server load of 0.xx as safe. As long as most of the time the server load is under 1.00, you should not notice any problems like your website being slow.
The uncertainties come when the server load has values over 1.00. Most web hosting company owners apply the following rule: if the server has a single CPU (central processing unit), a server load higher than 1.00 is not good; if the server has two CPUs, a server load over 2.00 is not good and so on.
You have to understand that these are average server loads. All web servers get busy from time to time, either because of an user’s abuse of resources, or because the server makes some back-ups etc. Usually the tasks requiring lots of resources are programmed by the host to be run during weekends when the traffic is lower so they won’t affect the users much.
Things however are not as black and white as you might think by now. With the powerful processors of today even single processor servers might cope quite well with a server load of 2.00.
Also, remember the definition: the server load represents the number of processes waiting to access the CPU. But not all processes are the same! If the processes are low priority, when a new server request (page request) appears, it will be handled almost instantly. That request will not be postponed at all, it will be dealt with immediately, while the lower priority processes will wait.
As usual, and as many people directly implicated in the hosting business say, it all comes down to real-life behavior. Are the pages loading fast? Does a process such as searching through a database take a reasonable time? Then you don’t really have a problem, whatever the server load is.
Not to mention that the server load is just one factor out of many others (memory usage, CPU usage, size of swap file) and it’s often influenced by them. I’ll give you an example. If the server has insufficient internal memory it will use a swap file. This means it will work intensely with the hard drive, which will increase CPU usage and in turn result in a higher server load which will make the server respond slowly to requests.
In such a case the solution is simple: more internal memory (RAM). That would lead to a lower swap file, lower CPU usage, lower server load, faster response speed. So the server was almost OK, all it needed was more internal memory.
So, the ultimate test is the way that the server behaves. If the server is fast, a number, even if it’s called “server load”, really doesn’t mean much. But then again, I love when I see it constantly at around 0.20.
Personally, if the server load is around 4.00 24/7 and we’re talking about a server with a single processor, I would suspect something is wrong: overselling or overloading. In that case, just to make sure I would never face serious problems, I would ask my host to do something about the server load or move my website to a server with a lower server load. If the response I get would not please me, I’d look for a new host.
I like to play it safe and that’s what I recommend you to do too: Play it safe!
How to estimate your Web Hosting needs
How to estimate your hosting needs
I write this article especially for people who are new to web hosting. This is why I will only talk about the basic needs (in a shared hosting environment): space, bandwidth. Most of the people looking for advanced features (scripting, databases) already know what they want/need anyway.
So let’s start with the space. Web space (disk space) is the amount of data you can store on the hard disk of the web server. Each web hosting accound comes with a certain amount of space, usually over 50 MB and less than 1000 MB.
Obviously, the amount of needed space depends on the size of the website. Most websites are composed of html (text) pages with a few images (gifs or jpegs) or even a little bit of Flash animation. Text is very economical; it occupies very little space. Images and flash are more expensive; they require a lot of space. If you’re new to the web you might think it’s great to have a lot of colorful images to make your website really beautiful. Don’t make this common mistake!
Your aim should be to say as much as you can on a page while maintaining it’s size under 50-60 KB including images. The reason? There are still lots of people using slow dial-up connections of under 56 Kbps. For them a 150 KB will take more that 21 seconds to load. A 60 KB page will take more than 8 seconds to load. That’s still a lot of time! A good page size is under 30 KB. A maximum page size is 50-60 KB.
Considering an average page size of 30 KB, you can put approximately 33 pages on 1Mb of space. If you have 10 MB of space available, you could host 330 pages. I only wish I had so many pages to put online. Don’t worry, I’m working on it!
The idea is this: unless you run a busy forum your needs for space are likely to be rather modest. Just keep in mind to achieve an average of 30KB/page and you should be more than fine even with 10 MB of web space.
Bandwidth is the amount of data that you’re allowed to transfer per month. It includes all uploads and downloads regardless of the protocol used (HTTP, FTP, POP etc.). Bandwidth depends very much on the average page size, but it also depends on the number of visitors your website will have and the average number of pages they visit. For an average page size of 30 KB, 20,000 visitors per month and 3 pages per visitor your website will need about 1800 MB (1.8 GB) of bandwidth per month. Most low cost hosting packages include that amount of bandwidth. Not to mention that 20,000 visitors per month is only a dream for most websites. Most don’t even have 2,000 visitors per month.
I took you through all those numbers just to give you an idea how to estimate your needs. If you’re just launching your website you will not need neither a huge amount of space, neither a huge amount of bandwidth. For 99% of people a hosting account with 10MB of space and 1Gb is more than enough.
Conclusion: Unless you have reasons to believe that your website will definitely have lots of visitors and unless you’ll offer movies or music for download (legally of course ), I see little reason for you to worry about space and bandwidth.
Just make your own calculations and also try to make sure that the host you choose allows account upgrades. That is to make sure you will be able to get more space and/or bandwidth if/when you need it without going through all the trouble of changing hosts.
The end. Cheers!
Windows or Linux Web Hosting
Windows or Linux Hosting
Which is “better”? Windows or Linux?
I will not even pretend on attempting to give a definitive answer to such a question. I don’t think there is one, or at least not in the “this one is better” formula. Like with most things, each side will have its strengths and weaknesses, it’s advantages and disadvantages.
It’s often been said that Linux is more secure and much more stable in general, although there is no Linux per se, but many flavors of it. Linux users tend to be sometimes fanatic in their support for their favorite operating system. The power of their convictions may be very impressive, but that shouldn’t be the only reason to believe they’re right. On the other hand, the average Linux user is somewhat more knowledgeable than the average guy when it comes to computers, so there’s a good chance that he knows what he’s talking about.
On the other side, Windows doesn’t seem to have that many true fans or they’re not that vocal. This might be explained by the fact that the Microsoft company has been involved in quite a few suits which have affected its image, and consequently the image of its products as well.
Desktop vs Server – stability
Many people who are just taking their first steps in “the wonderful world of hosting”, assume that, because their desktop computer or the computer that will be used to create the pages, uses Windows, they must look for Windows hosting. That’s not true at all. The pages can be created in Windows and hosted on a Linux box and vice versa. There’s no problem with that.
Also a confusion/over generalisation that is often made is that Windows is just Windows and that it is very buggy, unstable and insecure. There is no Windows though. There are many types of Windows, and they are not the same.
Both Windows 95 and Windows 98 were and are haunted by the dreaded and widely known (though not highly acclaimed) blue screen. While a blue screen would not be a very bad thing, what is bad about it is that you never seem to be able get out of it. The only thing you can usually do is to reset the computer.
Without any shadow of a doubt, the frequency of the blue screens was and is impressive on the fore mentioned operating systems, but what’s more bewildering about them is that they seem to appear almost out of the blue .
I’ll give you one example that I’ve witnessed on a computer that was running Windows 98. Everything was OK, the computer started. A few applications that were always on were loaded as usual (an antivirus, a dictionary and a few other things). The computer was left idle for minutes while my friend and I were talking. When we looked at the screen, it was “blue”. Yes, the blue screen was present, signaling a problem and the PC had to be restarted.
Now, what was wrong? What could’ve been wrong? The applications that were running have never caused any problems before, and nothing “exotic” was running at that time – not to mention that no one was actively using the computer. It’s this kind of things that give the Windows family a bad name.
Windows XP is a great step forward when it comes to stability and main the reason for that is that it is based on Windows 2000, which is a OS (operating system) designed for servers. Stability on Windows versions that were designed for servers is much better than the one for desktop (95 & 98 & me). This goes to note that Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 are not your average desktop operating system, they are playing in a different league.
Performance
Comparing Windows and Linux, one thing that has been often noted is that Linux handles high numbers of processes running at the same time much better than Windows – that Windows’ stability decreases faster when more processes run on the machine.
This in the end means that Linux might be able to squeeze more out of the server, but in the hands of a knowledgeable system administrator, a server will perform very well, regardless of the operating system, may it be Windows or Linux.
Linux is free while Windows is all about the money
This is a very popular view on things. Linux is open source and thrives because of the work of many volunteer programmers. The volume of work they put in and the quality of their work can only be commendable.
Windows, just like Linux, is a product created by the work of many programmers. They however are hired to do a job and they are paid to do it. Microsoft is their employer – a business – and, like any other business, its goal is to make a profit – to make money. That’s not seen as a bad thing for any of the small businesses out there, but it is sometimes seen as one when it comes to big companies, especially when the word monopoly comes to be associated with them. Sure, Microsoft did a thing or two do be seen as a “bad guy”, but let’s not get into that.
Then, which one should you look for?
The decision of going for Windows hosting or Linux hosting should be based on actual needs, not myths. More often than not it should be based on the knowledge that you and/or your staff/business partners/friends have, on the things that you plan do to with your website or on the things you’d prefer to learn.
Basic, static web pages are written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) which the browser interprets into the web pages as we see them, containing text, tables, images and so on. Pure HTML pages can be hosted on any type of web server, regardless of the operating system.
Dynamic, interactive web pages however, are a different kind of beast and they require powerful programming languages. Now, don’t confuse dynamic with animated. There may be animated objects such as gifs on the web pages, but that doesn’t make them dynamic. Dynamic pages are those of a forum, of a shopping cart etc. where you send information to the server and the server will store it and do things differently, in accordance with that information.
Some such programming languages are Perl, PHP, ASP, Python, Java etc. PHP and ASP are special with respect to this article due to their popularity and more. PHP is open source and free, while ASP is a Microsoft product.
While the developers of PHP took the necessary steps to make PHP usable on Windows based machines, Microsoft apparently (and unsurprisingly) saw little reason to make ASP usable on anything else than Windows.
Other companies and people are working on to port ASP on others operating systems, but, while their efforts are commendable and they have already made giant steps towards their goal, the solutions so far are only partial. Full use of ASP functions/capabilities on other operating systems besides Windows is not available yet.
One cross-platform ASP attempt is Sun Java System Active Server Pages. Another attempt is Apache-asp.org. Because Apache is the preferred web server for Linux, Apache-ASP makes a lot of sense.
To date, as I said, ASP and ASP.NET are fully usable only on Windows. I will try to stay on top of this and find out when a complete, ready for production, cross platform solution will be released by a company or anyone else for that matter, but until that time, if you plan to use ASP, you’d better stick to using Windows for your hosting.
PHP
PHP was developed by the open source community, much of which is gathered around Linux. Linux, Apache, PHP and MySql form a well known combination and they are known to work very well together.
Fortunately PHP works well on the Windows-IIS (Internet Information Services) platform too, which means that PHP scripts will work on a Windows machine as well (although a few chances in the scripts might be necessary).
PHP gained its popularity quite rapidly and it is renowned for being free, fast and powerful. Add to that the big number of scripts (many of which are free) that are written in PHP, the abundant information on just about every PHP related subject subject and you can understand why PHP becomes the choice of ever more users.
Making the choice
Windows as a hosting platform has at least one big advantage: full use of ASP and ASP.NET. If your plan to use ASP, because your employees know ASP or because it does a better job for your specific application, Windows hosting is the best choice right now.
Good thing is that PHP is not confined to Linux and it works quite well on Windows. If, at a later time, you decide to use PHP for certain things, you can do so without much worry, provided that your host has PHP on that server, of course.
Back to Linux – while it is not yet able to take full advantage of ASP, it is a very popular choice as an operating system for web servers. It is widely acclaimed for its stability and that has to count for something. While Windows’ instability, although it might be somewhat anecdotal, is a subject that is often discussed, Linux’s stability is almost undisputed.
Price and availability
Although Linux is known to be free and it basically is, some disputes over total cost of ownership as an operating system for web servers, do exist. Certain studies revealed that Windows might be cheaper to use than Linux in time and under certain conditions. Not surprisingly though, the sponsor behind these studies was Microsoft (in one form or another). Of course, counter studies exist also and they – of course – state the exact opposite. There’s a war out there, you know?
If you want to read more about this you could try searching on Google for “windows linux cost of ownership”.
While the “big guys” run their numbers and fancy extrapolations, in the real world, for one reason or another, Linux hosting is generally cheaper than Windows hosting, meaning that a dedicated server running Linux will cost less than a dedicated server running Windows. Moving this into the “shared hosting” space, one can obtain more web space and data transfer for the same amount of money if he chose Linux.
Now, another thing to notice is that most hosts offer Linux based plans, so finding a good Linux hosting company might prove easier. Not that there’s a lack of hosts offering Windows hosting. No! There are thousands of hosts out there and there’s a serious offer of Windows hosting. Just not in the numbers that Linux is.
So, what then?
Personally I would use Linux as the “default option” because of its widespread use, renowned stability, reliability and level of security and – why not mention – lower costs. However, some things are not available on the Linux platform. If your needs cannot be fully met by a Linux server, but they can be by a Windows server, then that’s the time when Windows will definitely be the better choice.