Why Use Virtual Dedicated Web Hosting
Most webmasters on the net today are familiar with what the industry calls “shared” web hosting accounts. A shared hosting account is where you rent a small amount of space on a server which is shared among many other users.
This is a cheap way to get started online but it has many disadvantages – you will encounter email delivery problems because of spam complaints against other sites on the same server. You will find your site’s grinding to a halt when someone else does some heavy database work on your server. You might even find your site going down because of a denial of service attack against someone else hosting hacking or piracy related material on your server (these type of sites attract antisocial elements!)
How can you avoid all of this drama?
By upgrading to a virtual dedicated server. A virtual dedicated server lets you run your sites as if you had your own “dedicated” server, except it is cheaper because you are really just using part of a server that has been split into multiple virtual dedicated servers.
You can find out more about this by searching Google for “virtual dedicated hosting”. Virtuozzo is the main commercial software that web hosts use to run virtual hosting services.
You will find virtual dedicated server accounts starting at just $30 a month. You’ll get a much larger chunk of bandwidth compared to shared hosting, and none of the problems that go with a shared host. You can also get multiple IP addresses that are exclusive to your sites.
So what’s the catch? Not much. You’ll probably spend a bit more on hosting each month. The main disadvantage of upgrading to virtual dedicated hosting is that you will need to be more technically proficient so that you can administer the server.
This requires a bit of time learning the necessary Linux skills to make sure your server runs smoothly.
Many hosting providers will have a “premium” support offering that includes a bit more hand holding – this is definitely recommended if you don’t have much experience with Linux, or are new to virtual dedicated hosting.
With the increased speed and bandwidth that a virtual dedicated host offers, and none of the shared hosting headaches, the move is one you will never regret. So, the question now becomes, are to ready and willing to take-on the challenge of virtual dedicated web hosting and save yourself some hard earned cash? The choice is your…
Chet Holcomb of http://www.Webdesignslc.com a web site design hosting firm is a successful web designer who offers advice, and special services to clients.
Hosting Your Website – Dot It Yourself in 7 Easy Steps
First, let me clarify something. There are many reasons why you would want to have your website professionally hosted. However, people in certain situations are better off hosting their site themselves. For example, if you are starting a new business or playing with an idea that you are not sure will work, you might not want to pay a hosting company to host your site, at first. Hosting the site yourself will allow you to save money that you can use to grow your business. Once your business starts growing and your site starts getting a lot of visitors, then you will find it necessary to pay a web hosting company to host it for you, but until then, you need to test the waters.
If you have a computer and a high speed internet connection (DSL/Cable) you can host your own website. You will need to keep your computer on and online 24/7, which should be no big deal. Besides this, you need only to follow the 7 steps I describe below, to make your website available to users on the internet:
1) Install a web server: Most Windows operating systems either come with a web server, or one can be downloaded for free depending on the version of Windows. The web server is the program that runs in the background on your computer listening to requests from people on the internet. It’s the software that finds your pages in your computer and sends them to the users requesting it.
2) Configure the web server: In this step you simply tell your web server where to find your website that is sitting somewhere in your computer.
3) Get a domain name: In this step you decide on the name that you want for your site and buy it from a provider. Domain names are cheap and you pay the fee only once a year.
4) Configure DNS: This is where you associate your website name with the IP address of your computer so users are transferred to your computer when typing the name of your website.
5) Configure your router: Your router needs to know about the computer that has the web page so it knows where to forward users to.
6) Dynamic IP solution: Most people have a dynamic IP address given to them by their ISP. This means the IP address of your computer might change. This is a problem because DNS needs to know the IP address of the computer that people need to be forwarded to when typing a domain name. There is a way to solve this problem without having to pay your ISP more money for a static IP. There are applications that will automatically update DNS when your IP changes.
7) Securing your server: The last step is to make sure your computer is protected from malicious programs on the internet by having the necessary software installed and configured.
Pedro Garcia – How to Build a Web Server – Learn how to perform the steps described in this article
Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine
Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine
I am going to be reviewing a couple of web hosts today. I will look at BlueHost (who also owns Hostmonster) and Hostnine. We will look at the service, some user experiences, how quickly they respond to their users, and how easy it is to use and navigate around the control panel.
Most reviews of web hosts contain a section describing the web hosts’ website. I will not mention anything about a hosts’ website unless I either have trouble finding something or I find a particularly interesting feature. I am not reviewing their websites (most have pretty cookie cutter websites anyway). I will start off with BlueHost.
Why am I not reviewing each web host separately? Web hosting is fast becoming a commodity, and apart from tiny differences in features, most web hosts are pretty similar. The only one that has bothered to differentiate itself is Go Daddy; they are the only “brand name” web host. This article just reviews the rest of the pack.
BlueHost
If you like variety, BlueHost is not for you. If you like simplicity and ease in setting up your account (and love inflexibility), BlueHost is for you. They have one plan and one plan only: 300 GB of disk space, 3000 GB of bandwidth, and 2500 e-mail addresses. The price varies depending on how long you sign up for in the program.
- 3 Months: $9.95/month + $30.00 Setup + Domain ($10.00 if purchased from BlueHost)
- 6 Months: $8.95/month + $30.00 Setup + Domain ($10.00 if purchased from BlueHost)
- 12 Months: $7.95/month (no setup fee, free domain included)
- 24 Months: $6.95/month (no setup fee, free domain included)
Obviously, the package drops its monthly charges the longer you sign up with BlueHost. A lot of neat features are offered, such as an unlimited number of add-on domains, parked domains, and sub-domains. It supports FTP and databases (50 each for MySQL and PostgreSQL – not much, but you can work with it). The strength of BlueHost has been their pushing of a single package at a competitive price. They had slightly more than 250,000 domain names under their control as of January 2007. This has made them a force to be reckoned with in the web hosting business.
Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine – Under The Hood, Ruby On Rails And Multiple Domain Management
I really liked the way BlueHost packaged their log on section. However, most of them require extra payments, so it seems kind of weird seeing promotional material on the cpanel page. Cpanel is normally quite cluttered (with tons of useful stuff), but BlueHost tweaked their cpanel in a couple of ways by providing additional services, such as an integrated billing profile manager, a direct link to the support center, a website creation tool, an additional webmail client, and a domain manager. Some other really neat features include Ruby on Rails support and the ability to support multiple accounts within one account. All of this makes life really convenient for any website administrator.
However, multiple domain name management opens a whole new kettle of fish, with problems arising if the name server is not on BlueHost. You have to switch name servers if you want to use it. This can lead to some down time on the site that is being transferred.
Support
Support is quick, and according to all users surveyed, you will get same day response on emails, including weekends. As a former user of enom and registerfly, that is a blessing. On registerfly, if I had a problem over the weekend, I had to wait through the weekend (bummer). There is toll-free telephone support from 8:00 AM to midnight eastern time and there is a forum for all BlueHost users.
However, support replying to your requests does not mean they will solve your problems. BlueHost has a reputation for being unreliable; see this post here for some user experiences. Most of the users complain that BlueHost refuses to take responsibility when things go wrong and only replies to emails if there are no serious problems. An associate of mine that runs on BlueHost has not had severe problems and swears by their helpful support staff. Nonetheless they do not have many fans. Here are some statistics that show BlueHost’s uptime (97%), new clients daily, and amount of customers they generate.
Terms Of Service
BlueHost has clearly stuck this little codicil into its terms of service: ”All activities may be monitored, recorded, and examined by any authorized person, including law enforcement.” This comes with this semi-shady comment: ”Any violation found or fraudulent activity that system personnel deem inappropriate may have your account immediately terminated without notice and any recorded evidence reported to authorized persons.” Add this to the fact that for more advanced features, you have to show photo identification (yes, photo identification) and you begin to wonder if Big Brother is always watching. More advanced features include taking advantage of the Ruby on Rails support.
An isolated case does not necessarily mean that a web host is bad – as long as it’s isolated.
Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine – HostNine
I do not use HostNine, however, I have been part of a forum (here) that has had some people who use HostNine and who have posted comments concerning it. I will endeavor to give as balanced a review as possible (considering that it is increasingly hard to get positive feedback from a majority of users who submit reviews). HostNine offers the set of services shown below.
HostNine Plans Listed:
HostNine Basic Plan
$3.95/mo., 5,000 MB, 100 GB
HostNine Standard Plan
$6.95/mo., 10 GB, 150 GB
HostNine Entry Reseller
$19.95/mo., 15 GB, 150 GB
Unlike Hostgator, who enter into pretty much every niche, and have something for everybody, HostNine has three basic plans. The packages are competitively priced, but it seems price is not everything. To make sure that these forum members were not simply out to destroy HostNine, I sampled other user forums. Generally, HostNine users do not report high levels of satisfaction with the web host. Check here for some user experiences. Before we take a look at how all this grief started, we will look at what HostNine has to offer its users.
HostNine has a great package for entry resellers. It is not a lot of space, but it gives you options to resell unlimited domains and the power to host ecommerce sites conveniently. With WHMCS for their resellers, this website allows computer users with intermediate skills to become resellers and manage the billing and support of their clients. Combine HostNine’s relative user friendliness (and a package that is attractively priced) and you get a lot of people jumping on the web host to become resellers or single users hosting multiple sites, especially with HostNine’s use of software, which allows customers to build web pages on the fly. And this is where it gets ugly; good business does not necessarily translate into good service.
The Guarantees
HostNine runs on Dell PowerEdge servers with no less than a Dual Xeon 2.8GHz processor along with a 100% Network Uptime guarantee by HostNine’s data center. Their terms and conditions clearly state that there will be daily back ups of all data. They run an aggressive marketing campaign (just Google a bit and you will have up to 50 percent free on the first month). HostNine’s support is said to be fastservers.net. HostNine’s biggest problem with its users is simply that they know a little too much about their web host.
Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine – The Invisible Man
My current relationship with Hostgator is an extremely mundane one. I pay my bills on time and everybody ignores everybody else; I don’t worry about traffic overloads because if a site I run is down, I just buy a few extra GBs that month. I have little or no relationship with anybody at Hostgator and I am not on a first (or last) name basis with anyone on their support staff.
The same cannot be said of HostNine. Even those that have “good” relations with the hosting company seem to have dropped a support ticket up to five or six times. That said, their servers are fast and they respond well to tickets. But again, the number of bad reviews on this company is simply exhausting! Most of the good reviews were written in the company’s first few months. It pretty much went downhill from there.
“I think HostNine are terrible for customer service. Everything before a sale is great, but after it’s a whole new story. The staff are liars, blatantly.”
Rude Support?
A lot of the complaints listed on the web state that support for HostNine is lazy, lying, or rude. Lest this becomes a crucifixion of HostNine (heck, it already has), I looked up some of the support comments and it has actually improved. A few months ago, representatives of the company actually owned up to ignoring a customer because he cursed them! (Ignoring the customer?) The fellow proceeded to start a scathing thread on webhostingtalk.
Now, I am not saying its okay for a customer to curse (and I am sure he must have really run up a tab on soap), but an angry customer who is web savvy and who is respected on a large forum or online community will (and has) cost them thousands of dollars. The support were not exactly rude… but you know what? You be the judge. Below is a comment made to the user after he complained that his site went down before he surpassed his bandwidth limit.
“Actually it is your fault, and you will continue to have problems at future hosts, guaranteed. Best of luck to you.“– Joshua Brown
This was a reply to an email I sent telling them how its not my fault your servers can’t handle what you promise they can!
So far, I have had 0 problems at innohosting. So much for that guarantee!
Now that’s a bit cold. I understand that the user may have been giving them problems, but “the customer is always right,” or shall we say, “the customer is king.”
Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine – Uptime
HostNine promises 99 percent uptime on their website. Now that’s pretty cool. But here are some user experiences that point to the contrary:
“I also wanted to add that their uptime is terrible an impressive 70.8% for January. Another thing there guarantee doesn’t live up to. Site says 99.9% uptime and daily backups none of which have been done. Something needs to be done to them.”
This is from the same thread as above. It actually is so bad that another (totally separate) fellow set up another thread on webhostingtalk complaining about uptime (here). The HostNine representative actually replied to this thread and stated their willingness to resolve the issue to the user’s satisfaction. But nobody seems to be willing to give the representative the time of day. His/her comments were dissected to see if s/he had made any false or misleading statements; fortunately, s/he did not.
What is the Problem?
Could HostNine be over extended? Is this just a run of bad luck or is something really wrong with support? The majority of web hosts are honest and keep thousands of people in work. It is not in the interest of anybody in the industry for any web host to be maligned and lose business. But if there is a high level of complaints about service, it is the task of peer reviewers to bring these complaints to light and examine them.It kind of hurts me to write all the things that have been said about HostNine because I know that every bad review is bad for business (and I own a reseller service myself). Nonetheless, I am reviewing web hosts and this one just had very little going for it.
In the next part, we will look at Hostgator, Go Daddy, and a few other web hosts. Thanks for reading.
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Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine
Web Hosted Office Suites
Web Hosted Office Suites
Most people by now are familiar with hosting for their web sites, but some people are not so familiar with web hosted office suites. The concept is relatively new, and there are very few options for people interested in them. In this article, I will discuss some of the companies who provide some type of web hosted office suite package.
Introduction
When I talk about a web hosted office suite, I am specifically talking about various software applications which are traditionally used on a single computer and are stored on that computer’s hard drive. Some examples of this would be Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on. Some companies are now providing these types of applications via the Internet. This type of service has its good points and bad points. I will discuss the positives and the negatives later on. It is fair to say, though, that this type of service will be more beneficial to some and not to others.
These types of web hosted services are referred to as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Many small businesses are finding them more useful and cost-effective than the traditional Microsoft Office software which stays on a single PC’s hard drive. The SaaS applications may be used on any computer, from anywhere in the world, which is one huge advantage of web hosted office suites.
Some of the web companies which have already entered the field of providing these web hosted applications are Google, Cisco Systems, Zoho, and Zimbra. At this point, the big two are Google with their Google Apps suite, and Cisco with their WebEx WebOffice suite. I want to take an inside look at what Google Apps and WebEx offer their customers.
While SaaS companies’ customers consist of mostly businesses, interested users can increasingly be found in every demographic. I would like to find out whether or not these web hosted office suites are a fad, or the software replacement for the next generation. One thing is for sure, Microsoft needs to jump on board soon, or else they may start to lose some of their software applications market share.
Web Hosted Office Suites – Google Apps Suite
Google Apps have been around since the end of 2006, and Google has expanded their services to meet the needs of small to large companies. Google Apps is not meant to replace Microsoft Office, but in many cases it does. Many companies are finding Google Apps to be much more cost-effective than Microsoft’s Office software. Microsoft does not currently offer their Office software through a web hosted application, but this may change in the future. Google Apps is becoming an attractive incentive for web hosts to offer to their customers.
Google Apps consists of a variety of applications including: Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Page Creator. Google offers three different editions of Google Apps including their Standard Edition, Premier Edition and Education Edition. Their Standard and Education Editions are completely free to use, and their Premier Edition currently costs $50 per person, per year. The Premier Edition offers 10 GB of email storage per account, no ads next to the email, and various APIs to integrate with an existing infrastructure. There is a host of other features as well, but you get the picture.
Some businesses are finding that a service such as Google Apps is a much more cost effective solution than having to install Microsoft Office into every computer in the office at a cost of a few hundred dollars per computer. One of the companies which have made the switch to Google Apps is Impelsys Inc, a global publishing company. The chief operating officer of Impelsys is Nizar Jamal, and he notes that “As a global company that specializes in the delivery of electronic content and publishing services, rapid and efficient communication within our company and with our customers is critical to us. Google Apps offers us the flexibility of communicating quickly and collaborating easily amongst our teams and with our customers — regardless of location.”
The software works well, and the price is certainly right. “In addition,” Jamal continues, ”Google Apps offers Impelsys a total cost of ownership that is very compelling compared to the cost of owning the software licenses, hardware and the support people involved in maintaining that software and hardware. For us, Google Apps is the right solution at the right price.”
Web Hosted Office Suites – WebEx: web hosted business solution
WebEx is a lot like Google Apps, but I think it offers more services for the price. There are many different options for the business owner or individual. Some may only want to take advantage of WebEx’s remote support, where you may access your computer’s desktop from any computer in the world, via the Internet. This service is currently being offered for as little as $9.95 per month. WebEx also offers a full suite of applications, much like the Google Apps Premier Edition, with a cost which is dependent upon the size of the business.
A new feature of WebEx is their pay-per-use feature. For those people who will occasionally need to host a meeting via the Internet, they have the option to due so on a per-minute basis. The current cost of this service is $0.33 per minute per participant, and this requires no contract or monthly charges.
WebEx is currently the leader in online meeting applications with a 64% market share. It’s easy to see the benefit of an online meeting application when you consider the amount of costs which are saved through online meetings rather than meeting in person. One of the major cost-saving benefits is on travel expenses for global companies who meet with clients from around the world.
With over 3.5 million people using WebEx’s services every month, it is easy to see that they are not just a fad. This is an established company which has been around since 1996, and I believe they will continue to grow. WebEx claims that their services are 100% safe and secure to use over the Internet. They say that online meetings and remote computer access is totally private, and that it is as safe as using your computer at home with traditional software.
There are some distinct advantages and disadvantages associated with the use of web hosted office suites by businesses or individuals. For some small businesses, web hosted office suites allow them to conduct business with anyone in the world through web conferencing. These small businesses are able to grow like never before with the help of these web hosted services. The main worry for other people is the issue of privacy and security, which is a valid concern with personal business being conducted over the Internet.
To highlight this concern for privacy, security on the Internet has never been a bigger issue with identity theft being at an all-time high. Many people believe that operating a computer remotely will leave critical information at risk for identity theft or other cyber crimes. I think this is the number one worry for businesses who have chosen not to jump on board the web hosted office suite bandwagon. From my research, though, it seems that those who have used Google Apps or WebEx have been happy with the service, as well as the safety of their critical information while using these services.
All of the web hosted office suite companies that I have looked at have some sort of security in place to protect all of your personal information. These companies realize that security is the number one concern of their potential customers, so they take it very seriously. To be honest, if security of a company’s vital information was really at risk, these web hosted office suites would not be as successful as they are. Obviously, they have made privacy a top priority, so that their customers will feel comfortable with their services. An example of this would be WebEx, who gives users who use their remote access feature the ability to specify which applications will be usable remotely, and which ones will not be remotely accessible.
I think that those people who get past the privacy issues of these web hosted applications really see the benefits of using these types of applications rather than traditional software. With the number of small businesses in the world today always looking for a cost-effective alternative, web hosted office suites offer them exactly what they need. Why would they want to pay hundreds of dollars for software to install on their computers, when they can get the same capabilities from a web hosted office suite without the high cost?
Even looking beyond the cost issues, there are other benefits. One very nice benefit of an application like WebEx is the fact that there are no software upgrades which need to be purchased and installed in the future. This makes it very easy to have the most up-to-date application without ever having to actually upload it to your computer. The bottom line is that the web hosted office suites are cheaper and much easier to keep up-to-date than traditional software; the only drawback is the potential privacy issues.
For web hosting resellers, these kind of applications could be a potential incentive to their business and e-commerce customers. To be able to offer a full suite of business applications to your customers would be a huge advantage. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some web hosting companies start to offer online office suites to their business customers. If you couple this with nice business website templates, you can offer your customer everything they need to get their business up and running.
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Web Hosting and Power, Resource Issues
Web Hosting and Power, Resource Issues
As a web host, you may feel a little like you’re caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to your resources. Everything costs money: advertising to get customers, purchasing servers for those customer web sites, and powering those servers to keep the web sites up and running. What’s a web host to do with all this stress?Well, the first thing you need to realize is that it’s not your imagination. Costs really are going up, and they start with those servers. The Uptime Institute, an IT education and consulting firm, recently published a white paper to prove that point. Titled “The Invisible Crisis in the Data Center: The Economic Meltdown of Moore’s Law,” it makes for uncomfortable reading for anyone whose job involves lots of servers – and that certainly includes web hosts.
It’s hard to think of Moore’s Law as the villain in this case. It isn’t the law itself so much as the expectations it raises, and the fact that other factors involved in server power and maintenance don’t keep up with it. Let’s look at the math. Server computing performance has increased by a factor of three every two years since 2000. So to date, it has risen by a factor of 27. Looked at that way, perhaps we shouldn’t ask why we’re consuming so much power, but rather, why aren’t we consuming more?
The answer, of course, is that energy efficiency for servers has risen as well. It has risen too slowly to keep pace with the increase in computing performance, however – by only a factor of eight. So power consumption per computational unit is down 80 percent, but we’re putting a lot more of those computational units in play, meaning that we’re consuming more than three times as much power at the plug. When you add in the fact that these chips often require significant cooling in part because they’re more tightly packed than they were in older computers, you face some real power guzzling.
How bad is it? Uptime figures that by 2009, the cost to power a server over three years will be greater than the cost of the actual hardware. To quote Antone Gonsalves, covering the issue for Information Week, “by 2012, $1 million spent on servers will add $6.54 million more to the total cost of ownership of data center infrastructure than what was required in buying $1 million worth of servers in 2000.”
Web Hosting and Power, Resource Issues – Painful Infrastructure Spending
As a web host, it’s natural to wonder if there’s some way around this kind of painful expenditure. The point you need to keep in mind is that this is infrastructure spending. The growth of your business is going to require that you make these kinds of outlays if you want to remain in business.
Actually, it’s a little worse than that. You need to spend this kind of money not just for your main infrastructure, but for providing a back up should the main servers fail. That failure can happen even if you maintain your servers perfectly.
To illustrate this point, in late July, San Francisco experienced a major power outage that affected many businesses. PG&E estimated that 30,000 to 50,000 of their customers, many of them data center providers, went without power in the face of the outage – even the power company itself! Web hosting site Hosting.com wrote a smug press release saying that their own data center located at 630 Third Street “remained fully operational and online throughout the duration of the outage.” The company has data center facilities in Kentucky, California, and Massachusetts, so one assumes they have excellent redundancy in place. The point is, if your competition makes hay out of the strength of their infrastructure, you can’t afford to skimp on yours.
On the other hand, there are ways to reduce your power consumption by as much as 50 percent, according to Uptime. Make sure all servers have their power saving features enabled. Turn off servers that are no longer being used. Check your software for bloat; get rid of the power and resource hogs and replace them with more efficient applications. And consider server virtualization, a technique that permits the consolidation of server software onto a single box to free up data center capacity. It will only delay the inevitable, but it’s certainly better than nothing.
Web Hosting and Power, Resource Issues – Is Overselling a Solution?
Another way of possibly delaying the inevitable is to oversell, as many web hosts do. When a web host oversells a particular server, he puts more accounts on that server than it can technically support. Like the energy crisis in data centers, it’s a matter of math. Just to pull numbers out of a hat, let’s say that you have an account that provides your customers with 10 MB of disk space and 25 GB of data transfer. Your server can support 100 MB of disk space and 250 GB of data transfer. That means, in theory, it can support 10 accounts. You figure your customers aren’t going to use all that space, so you put 15 accounts on that server.
That’s overselling, and it’s fine – as long as your customers don’t use up all of the resources they have been allocated. Many, perhaps even most, hobby web sites won’t have a problem. But a lot of web sites offer downloads now, and that can eat up a massive amount of both disk space and data transfer.
If one of your customers has a 1 MB PDF file that visitors can download from his or her site, with your current account set up the customer will expect that it can be downloaded 25,000 times in a month, not counting the HTML to help visitors download it in the first place. That’s not bad…unless the PDF goes viral.
And that’s just for PDF files. Music files take up more space, and video files take up even more space than music files. One MB represents only seconds of video information. If you have a fanatical hobbyist who has put together a very nice half-hour video showing how to do something, it could easily be more than 200 MB in size. Suddenly that 25 GB that looked so big before means that only 125 visitors can view the video in a month. And what happens if the person does a whole series of videos? Before you scoff at this, consider that many podcasters have long-running shows and like to keep all of their podcasts available on their site for their fans. For example, Mitch Keeler does a regular podcast on web hosting that already runs to 118 episodes and counting.
Overselling is only a solution if you know your customers’ needs very well and are willing to commit to having the resources available to your customers if and when they need them. This involves calculating the amount of money you will need to get those resources and setting it aside for that purpose. As Paul Hirsch explained in a blog post for Web Host Industry News, “So, if you’re willing to finance up to 1 Tb. of additional data transfer or perhaps a dedicated pipe, that’s how much you oversell…This is a very small-scale example, but the same principle applies whether you have one server or 1,000 in a cluster.” In this way, you’re overselling without over promising.
Web Hosting and Power, Resource Issues – Going Green?
There are other ways of saving all that power. A lot of web hosts recently have talked about “going green” to reduce pollution. What exactly does that involve? For many web hosts, it means buying carbon offset credits – basically paying for something that mitigates greenhouse gas emissions. This doesn’t reduce your costs, because you’re still doing business as usual. But there are other ways to go green.
Mitch Keeler on one of his recent Web Hosting Show podcasts noted that green web hosts who go green through carbon credits sound like scams to him. In his opinion, a web host would be really green “if that host made changes that actually have to do with the business that they’re doing…they could turn off their monitors in their office after an hour of not being used, use more efficient servers…there’s a million and one different things that you could do to save energy and cause less pollution out there.”
Greenest Host is one company that claims it is doing everything it can to be green. The company has built a data center in San Diego that boasts 120 solar panels. These panels generate all of the power needed to keep their AMD Opteron servers running; AMDs were chosen because they consume 60 percent less energy and generate 50 percent less heat than the alternatives. The center was built using steel, and features several layers of “environmentally friendly insulation” to reduce the amount of energy needed to run it.
Greenest Host’s back up generator runs on propane gas, which burns more cleanly than diesel. The cooling system is also energy efficient; it monitors the outside air, and when it gets to 50 degrees Fahrenheit or below, the system sucks the air inside, filters it and uses it for cooling, saving on electricity. These are just a few of the company’s practices. Getting environmentally friendly could be good for your bottom line as well.
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Web Hosting and Power, Resource Issues