Domain Hosting News and Questions

Sergej Davidovic asked:




People who are looking for the Drupal hosting for the first time will find this article exceptionally useful. However, more experienced Drupalers might also find it very helpful. The article is structured into following sections:



Introduction

Web Hosting Types

Drupal Hosting Requirements

Estimating Your Drupal Hosting Needs

Web Hosting Type Selection

Web Hosting Provider Selection

Web Hosting Package Selection

Drupal Web Hosting Example – ThemeGarden

Conclusion



Web Hosting Types

There are several web hosting types:



shared web hosting – several web sites are hosted on one server computer, sharing resources like processor, RAM, bandwidth and running single operating system. The most economical option for hosting, as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance (4-20 $/month)

virtual private server (VPS), also called virtual dedicated server(VDS) – one physical server computer is partitioned into multiple servers where each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted. VPS is more flexible and powerful than shared hosting, for more demanding purposes (20-75 $/month)

dedicated server – the client leases entire server not shared with anyone. The most flexible and powerful web hosting service (75-500 $/month)

others – off-topic (server collocation, clustered hosting …)



Drupal Hosting Requirements

For running Drupal it is necessary to have a Web Server that can execute PHP scripts. Recommended is Apache, but Microsoft’s IIS is adequate as well. Furthermore, you will need PHP and PHP-supported Database Server, like MySQL or PostgreSQL. For more details on Drupal requirements, see drupal.org/requirements .

Web Hosting Type Selection

If you plan to host less demanding Drupal site, it is probably best to choose the least expensive, shared hosting. On the other hand, if you plan to run an advanced Drupal site, or Drupal site with significant traffic, you could choose VPS or even dedicated server.

Transition from smaller web hosting package to bigger one, on the same hosting type and provider, is straight forward and easy. Therefore you could plan your needs for the longer period, because transition from one hosting type to another is more complex.

Web Hosting Provider Selection

After estimating your needs and selecting the most appropriate hosting type, the next step is to decide about web hosting provider.

On the market, there are plenty of low cost or even free web hosting service providers, but you should avoid them due to lack of quality of service. For small difference in your budget, you can choose more reliable web hosting, with much better uptime, technical support and less headaches.

Hosting providers usually offer one or more hosting types and several hosting packages within each hosting type, differing in storage, bandwidth, supported features etc.

Web Hosting Package Selection

You could choose your Drupal web hosting package to fulfill both your needs, today and tomorrow. But even better, you could consider to take smaller web hosting package, with an option to expand it to bigger package in the future, as your needs are growing.

For people running or plan to run multiple sites, it could be interesting to consider reseller hosting packages (25-100$/month). This kind of hosting package offers to split your hosting package in smaller pieces, which you can use independently, with their own domain names, disk space… You could even resell them to others (this can also be interesting for web designers, to resell hosting packages to their clients).

Drupal Web Hosting Example – ThemeGarden

For illustration themegarden.org is powered by Drupal core modules and module for switching Drupal themes (switchtheme module). There are more then 100 Drupal 4.7 themes, and 80 Drupal 5 themes installed at the moment. Furthermore, site was visited in last month by 8000 visitors with 75000 page views (in March 2007, 3000 visitors with 40000 page views), and could be hosted on some stronger shared hosting package.

But, since the planned traffic for September 2007 was more then 20000 visitors with not less then 150000 page views, plus two more web sites, decision was made to rent a VPS web hosting with 256 MB dedicated RAM (Apache takes 48 MB), 10 GB disk space and 300 GB bandwidth, on OpenVz server virtualization platform. So far ThemeGarden has not experienced any hosting bottleneck.

Conclusion

For beginners, in most cases the shared hosting will be quite enough. But do not fall into the lure, and take some of the cheapest shared hosting packages, with lot of disk space, but with lack of features and/or reliability and with poor technical support. Your startup web page, probably wouldn’t need 500 GB of the disk space. Instead, you will want your web page is a rather fast-loading. Also, when something goes wrong, the most important is to restore the web site in shortest term, and then the good technical support could be crucial.

As long as whole shared host server is not full loaded, the performance can be quite enough for you. But, when this change, and not only due to your increased traffic, but also due to total server load, your site may become hardly available.

This implies that the main decision about hosting type depends on how much your site is important to you. Can you afford to be temporary unavailable or not? If the answer is yes, then the shared hosting is the right solution for you. Otherwise, consider VPS or dedicated server. The main advantage of VPS and dedicated server hosting compared with shared hosting is the guaranteed performance.

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons (Attribution-NoDerivs: 3.0) License



Budget web hosting

William Helmy asked:




A virtual dedicated server hosting, also identified as virtual private server, offers one of the ways of partitioning one server computer into many servers. With this, every server gets the facade and capablenesses of supporting its private dedicated machine or computer. In every virtual dedicated server hosting, a full-fledged running system can severally function and reboot each server.

Virtual dedicated server hosting is not a new technology as it had been in popular use in mainframe computers. Still, it owns its Renaissance with the advance of technologies and virtualization software for different architectures. Entirely, virtual dedicated server hosting works as �a bridge between shared hosting services and virtual dedicated server hosting plans. The largest advantage of utilizing virtual dedicated server hosting is its cheaper, in comparison to a dedicated hosting server.

A virtual dedicated server hosting mostly executes its own copy of operating system with consumers having super-user-level access. Above all, in virtual dedicated server hosting, you may well set up virtually whatever software system that runs on the OS. Occasionally, certain software system doesn’t work best in a virtualized surroundings. This takes on firewalls, antivirus clients, and still the virtualizers.Having pronounced that, Inmotion Web-hosting provide their virtual dedicated servers hosting, completed by raid disk mirroring, brute force detection system already installed.

Early time has discovered the big growth of the amount of virtualization customers. That virtualization buyers, normally, work on a only machine. A virtual dedicated server hosting generally has small central processor time, RAM, and disc storage. You will go amazed to know that at times virtual dedicated servers are as well applied as honeypots. These honeypots let a machine to purposely go computer software by known security defects. They, sure, make trusted that it is finished without threatening the residual of the server. Numerous honeypots has the ability to be speedily established through virtual dedicated servers in this way.

While picking out a virtual dedicated server hosting company, ask the coming enquiries. Finalize your option simply if you are convinced :

1. Are you ready for features of the web server, which can be, the Memory, CPU, and system throughout?

2. The quantity of virtual dedicated servers are carried out by the web host server that you will be when turned on at?

3. How is resource contention dealt with? Put Differently, what happens if whole the other virtual dedicated servers on your web hosting company server are working CPU/RAM-intensive processes?

4. Final, do you have got a dedicated minimum number of CPU/Network use? If so, how much?

All that questions are satisfactorily answered by virtual dedicated server hosting supplied by Inmotion Hosting. Inmotion Hosting allows network monitoring, daily information supports, 99.9% uptime, automated backup and 3 months money back warranty (the greatest warranty).�



Web Hosting FAQs

Nisha Soni asked:




Data Center Colocation

Data center colocation is a kind of data center where many customers locate server and network and interconnect to variety of network and telecommunication service provider. Many big companies are going for data center collocation in India for managing its data system and information. There are several advantages because of which businesses are opting for data collocation system.

Advantages

First of all data center requires an enormous amount of power voltage which is very costly for many firms. Using data collocation service, allows you to share the power with other users. This lowers the cost incurred and is as efficient as an individual data center. Moreover, the service providers ensure that they use power equipment of very good quality so there is no risk of loosing important data of the company.

Colocation data centers have a high level of security which you can not afford to have in your office. It is very difficult for property thieve to access your company information. You need not be concerned about bandwidth working capacity and probability of spike which may occur because of high usage of bandwidth. In case of spikes, there are on sites experts to handle it. Efficiency and bandwidth is also optimized due to the routing system used by collocation.

Companies which are choosing data collocation center are also able to save time. Moreover, if any improvement is required on the bandwidth, it is not an issue of your company only; in fact it is shared by all the users. So company saves a lot on this front.

In addition, the responsibility of taking measures to guard against environmental disturbance is now in the hand of data collocation service provider. Moreover, when you have data center outside your company, that means that your internal network are free and can be used to perform other function.

You also avoid the expense of employing and training the staff to run and repair your system.

Data Center Colocation India

There are many data center in India offering a comprehensive suite of fully managed data center services. They provide quality support and redundant servers which gives maximum consumer satisfaction by setting standard for performance and reliability. Data center collocation in India have world class data center infrastructure, secure system and depth of expertise that would ensure that business would retain competitive edge in the future.

Finally, having a data system located in the premises of your offices is very expensive; hence many firms are sharing this cost in the form of data collocation centers.