Articles
- Transferring Your Web Site To a New Web Hosting Service
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There are various reasons why an online business owner like you has decided to switch to a new web hosting providers. Your old web hosting provider probably has very poor technical support, or their web server is always down, or may be your old web hosting provider cannot meet your hosting requirements anymore or you could have discovered a cheaper web hosting service…and etc. Regardless of the reasons, now you have found a new web hosting service and you need to transfer your website from your current web host to the new web host. Below is the steps-by-steps guide that you can follow to achieve a painless and error free of moving to a new web hosting provider.
Read more... - Unlimited Bandwidth and Web Hosting
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What's this bandwidth thing again?
First of all, we have to establish one thing here. I'm not talking about bandwidth in the sense of speed of transmission (bits/second). I'm talking about the so called bandwidth which measures the total amount of transmitted data (bits). Although, considering the fact that most packages come with a specified amount of Gigabytes/month, you could consider it to be that other bandwidth. But who cares? You know what I'm talking about, right?
This unlimited bandwidth issue is one of the most controversial issues in the web hosting industry. Certain web hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth in their hosting packages. That would not be an issue in itself. The thing is that they offer it at a fixed price! Can you put a fixed price on something unlimited? Read more... - Multiple Domain Names - Use and Benefits
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It's quite common for a site to be referenced by more than one domain name. In fact, most sites are referenced by at least two: a www version and a non-www version. These are usually set up to reference the index page on a site and produce the same results
for a searcher.
It could, however, be argued that these are these same domain names. So the question remains: why would someone want to have more than one unique domain name for a single site?
Read more... - Hiring a Web Design Company
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Regardless whether you manage a small business, charitable organization, or Fortune 500 company, choosing the right web design firm can quickly become a full-time research project. With thousands of web design companies to choose from, what factors truly determine which design company is best for your business?
The primary considerations for choosing a web design company are:
- Price
- Customer service/access to support
- Credibility indicators of the design firm
- Portfolio and design experience Read more...
| How Multiple Server Hosting Impacts Your Website Uptime |
| Blog - Web Hosting | |||
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This article describes the technology behind multiple server hosting and how you may utilize it to maximize your site's security and uptime. Hosting of web sites has essentially become a commodity. There is very little distinguishing one hosting company from the next. Core plans and features are the same and price is no longer a true determining feature. In fact, choosing a host based on the cheapest price can be more expensive in the long term with respect to reliability issues and possible loss of sales as a result of website downtime. Selecting a host from the thousands of providers and resellers can be a very daunting task, which may result in a hit and miss approach. But although hosting may have become a commodity, one distinguishing feature that you must always look out for is reliability. If you don't know the uptime of your site, or its performance level, try a web site monitoring service such as http://www.dotcom-monitor.com . At the heart of any hosting company's reliability is redundancy. This ensures that if a problem exists at one point, there will be an alternative which ensures continuity as seamlessly and transparently as possible. Most hosts do employ redundant network connections. These are the high speed pipes that route data from the server to your web browser. But, redundant 'multiple web servers' have been extremely rare and very expensive, requiring costly routing equipment which has previously been used only in mission critical applications of Fortune 500 companies. However, a very neat but little known Domain Name Server(DNS) feature called 'round robin' allows the selection and provision of a particular IP address from a 'pool' of addresses when a DNS request arrives. To understand what this has to do with server reliability it's important to remember that the Domain Name Server (DNS) database maps a host name to their IP address. So instead of using a hard to remember series of numbers (IP address) we just type in your web browser www.yourdomain.com, to get to your website. Now, typically it takes at least 2 to 3 days to propagate or ‘spread the word’ of your DNS info throughout the internet. That's why when you register or transfer a domain name it isn't immediately available to the person browsing the web. This delay has stymied the security benefits of hosting your site on multiple servers, as your web site would be down for a couple of days if something went awry with one server. You would have to change your DNS to reflect your second server and wait days before the change was picked up in routers on the internet. Failover Monitoring However, the round robin DNS strategy solves this predicament, by mapping your domain name to more than one IP address. Select hosting companies now employ the DNS round robin technique in conjunction with 'failover monitoring'. The DNS round robin failover monitoring process starts by a web hosting company setting up your site on two or more independent web servers (preferably with different IP blocks assigned to them). Your domain name will therefore have 2 or more IP Addresses assigned to it. Then the failover monitor watches your web server(s) by dispatching data to a URL you specify and looking for particular text in the results. When the system detects that one of your IP addresses is returning an error, and the others aren't, it pulls that IP address out of the list. The DNS then points your domain name to the working IP address/s If any of your IP's come back online they are restored to the IP pool. This effectively and safely keeps your site online – even if one of your web servers is down. The average failure detection and recovery time with a system like this can be as low as 15 minutes. This time varies depending on the speed of your site and the nature of the failure and also how long other ISP's cache (save) your DNS information. The time taken for other ISP's caching your information can be manipulated in the failover monitor by lowering the "time to live" (TTL) cache settings. These are the settings that other ISP's will use to determine how long to cache your DNS information. Of course you must bear in mind the matter of how frequently data is synchronized between your website's servers. This will be the hosting company's responsibility, and this may become complicated where databases and user sessions are involved. The very expensive hardware based failover monitoring systems that point a virtual IP address to other ISP's, while behind the scenes juggling a number of unique IP addresses on different servers, is of course the most 'elegant' solution to multi server hosting. That way, the whole issue of ISP's caching your information does not come into play. Therefore, for web sites that need to have true 99.99995% uptime, without huge outlays of money, the technology is readily available and certain proprietary failure monitoring systems are now relatively cheap to apply.
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