Domain Hosting News and Questions

Web Hosting asked:




In today’s market scenario almost 99% of webmasters are familiar with the word “shared” web hosting accounts. Talking in real what is a shared hosting account? It is a place where one can rent a small quantity of space on a particular server which he/she has to share with other users.

One can say it is a cheap way to begin an online business but user will surely have to face several disadvantages afterwards. The problem that may happen afterwards includes inefficiency in email delivery due to spam problem. One will find his/her site coming to a pause when someone else will try heavy database work on his/her server. There are several other reasons as well which can cause a site to go down example due to a denial of service attack against someone else hosting hacking or piracy related material on one’s server.

Prevention:

Now we are going to discuss how we are going to prevent all this. By upgrading to a virtual dedicated server is a possible prevention against this problem. A virtual dedicated server helps in successful running of one’s site in the same manner as if one is having his/her own “dedicated” server. The plus point with virtual dedicated server is that it is really cheaper as compared to own server.

One can find virtual dedicated server accounts for as less as mere $30 per month. Not only that in addition one will get more amount of bandwidth as compared to shared hosting, and that too without any problem of shared hosting. One will also receive multiple IP addresses that are exclusive to his/her sites.

Thus one can get tremendous amount of benefits by just spending little more. However as like a coin here too is a second side. The main disadvantage of upgrading to virtual dedicated hosting is that one will has to be more technically sound as he/she has to administer his/her server by own.

Thus for administration one will have to learn necessary Linux skills to make sure that his/her server runs in a proper way.

There are several host providers offering “premium” support that includes a bit more hand holding. It is mainly recommended if the user is not having good experience with Linux, or if he/she is a beginner for virtual dedicated hosting.

Thus at the end we can conclude that with the increased speed and bandwidth that a virtual dedicated host is offering and that too without any disadvantages of the shared hosting headaches, it is now on the user to decide what is best for him/her. We wish best of luck!



web hosting directory

Chandni Gupta asked:




Free web hosting service: is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported web hosting, and is often limited when compared to pay hosting.

Shared web hosting service: one’s Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.

Reseller web hosting: allows clients to become web hosts themselves. For more help visit to: www.online-auction-gold.com. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a provider. Resellers’ accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a collocated server.

Virtual Dedicated Server: dividing a server into virtual servers, where each user feels like they’re on their own dedicated server, but they’re actually sharing a server with many other users. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. This is also known as a virtual private server or VPS.

Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. For more detail go to: www.auction-profesional.com. Another type of Dedicated hosting is Self-Managed or Unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for Dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the box, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated box.

* Managed hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server but is not allowed full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.

Collocation web hosting service: similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of the web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client’s machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colo, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.

Clustered hosting: having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered Servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution.

Grid hosting: this form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.

Home server: usually a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs.

Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user’s connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.



Web Hosting and Domain Registration

Amy Armitage asked:




Before you can talk about differences between clustering and load balancing, and there are more than a few, you’ve got to get the definitions straight. Clustering is often understood to mean the capability of some software to provide load balancing services, and load balancing is often used as a synonym for a hardware- or third-party-software-based solution.

In practice, clustering is usually used with application servers like IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and Oracle AS (10g). Also being used in that environment are load balancing features found in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) like BIG-IP. (For simplicity, we will talk about clustering versus ADC approaches.)

Scalability, horizontally speaking

There are hardware load balancers, of course, but there we talk about pools or farms, the server groupings where application requests get distributed. It is in the software world that the term cluster is applied to that same group.

Clustering will typically convert one instance of an application server to a master controller, then process/distribute requests to multiple instances using such industry standard algorithms as round robin, weighted round robin or least connections. Clustering is similar to load balancing in that it has horizontal scalability, a nearly transparent way to add additional instances of application servers for increased capacity or response time performance. To ensure that an instance is actually available, clustering approaches typically use an ICMP ping check or, sometimes, HTTP or TCP connection checks.

Health and transparency

For load balancing, ADCs support the same industry algorithms, but have additional, complex number-crunching processes, and check such parameters as per-server CPU and memory utilization, fastest response times, etc. ADCs also support more robust health monitoring than the simple app server clustering solutions. This means they can verify content and do passive monitoring, dispensing with even the low impact of health checks on app server instances.

For applications that require the user to interact with the same server during a session, clustering uses server affinity to get the user there. This is most common during the execution of a process like order entry, where the session is used between pages (requests) to store data needed to close a transaction, like a shopping cart.

For the same situation, ADCs use persistence. Clustering solutions are usually somewhat limited as to the variables they can use, while ADCs can not only use traditional application variables but also get other information from the application or network-based data.

More than a few clustering solutions need node-agents deployed on each instance of an application server that is clustered by a controller. It may not be a burden as far as deploying and managing it, since it is often in place, but it is still means more processes running on the servers and consuming memory and CPU resources. Of course, it also adds another possible failure point to the data path. Since ADCs need no server-side components, they remain completely transparent.

Making the choice

Some would ask, Why do the extra work of building a distributed software system and cluster server setup when you can have multiple servers fulfilling specific roles such as separate database servers, web servers, mail servers, etc. whenever necessary?

So, how do you choose? That depends on the reasons you are considering this kind of solution in the first place, and (perhaps) whether or not you have to make an additional purchase to achieve clustering capabilities for the particular application server you have. There is also the broader question of whether or not you need (or want) to provide support for multiple application server brands. Clustering, of course, is proprietary to the application server, but ADCs can provide services for any and all applications or web servers.

Clustering checklist

Pros:

*Typically available with application server’s enterprise package

*Doesn’t require the highest level of networking know-how

*Usually less costly than redundant ADC deployments

Cons:

*High availability not assured with clustering solutions

*Best practices deploy the cluster controller on separate hardware

*Node agents required on managed app server instances

*Clustering is “proprietary” (you can cluster only homogeneous servers)

ADC checklist

Pros:

*Provides high availability and load balancing in heterogeneous environments

*Added value of application optimization, security and acceleration

*No changes required to applications or servers where they’re deployed

Cons:

*An additional piece of infrastructure in the architecture

*Generally more costly than clustering solutions

*Could require new skill set to deploy/manage

Recommendations

Get more insight into performance, configurations and case studies by reading some testing-based articles on ADCs, and testing-based reviews of server clustering. Look for case studies that mirror your own situation, as closely as possible, and talk to people who are doing what you are planning (or thinking about). Unlike government going into the car business or taking over health care, do not do something quickly just to be seen doing something. Take care with this decision.



3D Domain Registration