The steps are pretty simple so far, but before you are geared up to go forward with the server upgrades, you have to first decide which operating system works the best with your firm goals. The two most popular platforms used in a lot of various industries are Windows-based servers and Linux servers for operations. Numerous companies tend to prefer a Windows-based server to use since it is easy to operate and is optimized for networking and cooperation, which can be very useful for a large corporation. Linux servers can be a little more quirky to manage because they require a bit more of advanced system knowledge. This is why many people prefer to have a professional man server for them, or they will hire someone in-house specifically for the job. Normally, a Windows-based server is more expensive to install and operate, while a Linux-based server is more economical to install, but costs can add up paying someone to manage it for you if you do not have the appropriate knowledge. Selecting on which operating system for your dedicated server to install depends on various factors and of course, your budget.

Choosing an encoding parallel platform is a vital priority, otherwise more time and money will have to be invested trying to make odds compatible. Also be sure to check that the administrator assigned to tend to your dedicated server is prepared with the right training and platform-specific knowledge that you and your hardware require. Current trends have made it widely known that companies which use independent sources to manage their dedicated servers have seen a sizable increase when it comes to in-house productivity. Why is this? In house employees are free to go about their core business strengths while not having to worry about technical maintenance. Business server colocation host will usually offer two main options for clients, managed or unmanaged services. Hosting companies are there to help.

The primary business can assume as much or as little responsibility when it comes to the control and flexibility of their servers. Also, hosting companies offer their clients a commanding technological foundation to support their goals and free them of superfluous problems. One of the main reasons businesses want to use managed dedicated servers is because a host company reduces downtime. A data center is properly equipped with cooling systems to prevent overheating and most importantly, powerful backup generators to keep you up and running. Once these services are outsourced to data centers, a vast majority of clients have seen a large scale reduction in downtime, affirming that these professionals are positively impacting their business workings. If a company suffers chronic downtime, clients are equally likely to go to different suppliers who do not have that problem. A reputable server colocation hosting company can keep the state of at least 99% uptime, your customers will appreciate. Hopefully this will serve as a guide when planning the growth and development of your business on a more technical front.

Are you using Dedicated servers for your Online Business? Do share your experience with us, here in the comments section.

Traffic – The number of hits, page views and unique visits are the main variable to take into account. Obviously, if there is going to be a lot of traffic through your website, you’ll need more RAM; inversely, less traffic requires less RAM.

Operating system – To run Windows Server you’ll need at least 512MB RAM, with recommended 1GB for Windows Server 2003 and recommended 2GB for Windows Server 2008. For Linux based server, 64MB RAM will be enough, or even less depending on a choice of a distro.

Static or dynamic site? Scripts and databases are memory hogs. If you use PHP or other scripting language and SQL databases then you need more RAM. How you use them and the size and the number of the databases will largely influence amount of RAM needed for site to function.

Content management systems – usage of Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and other CMSs will result in need for more RAM. There might be slight differences in memory usage between various CMSs, but the main factor here is how many and which additional plugins/modules are installed and used. The other important factor is the number of logged in/authenticated users in any given time – their hits consume much more memory than those of anonymous users.

Do you use control panel? Controls panels can be resource hog too, some of them less some of them more. Check this control panel’s comparison table for more info.

What other applications run on the server – email clients, antivirus, firewall, email spam protection will also make a difference in the amount of RAM you require.

Caching – if a large part of your site is set to be cached by proxy servers and browsers – that will significantly improve performance and decrease ram usage. Some static content that doesn’t change too often should be always cached. (such as images, css, and js). On Apache server you can use .htaccess to control caching.

So, with all this in mind lets start a “guessing game”, how much RAM do I need? Setup example:

Linux OS

Apache web server

SQL database like MySQL or PostgreSQL

Scripting Language like PHP

Content management system like Drupal, Joomla or WordPress

Firewall

Antivirus software like ClamAV

Email server and web mail client like Open Webmail or Squirrelmail

FTP server with SSH supported like Proftpd

“Light” control panel like Webmin or DirectAdmin

If you have no traffic or very low traffic on a setup like this, you’ll probably be fine with 512MB RAM. If you have 200 000 monthly visits and 500 000 page views you’ll need at least 1GB RAM. If you have more than 1 000 000 monthly visits and more than 2 000 000 page views you’ll need to upgrade to 4GB or more.

Take this advice only as a starting point; as I already said this was a “guessing game”. The actual amount of memory that will be required by your website will vary on your site setup, optimization of every piece of software on your server and number of logged in users. If you plan to have more than one site on a server, things will get even more complicated. Feel free to post question in comments about estimated RAM consumption for any particular setup and we will try to answer it. Some more tips:

• It is easy to upgrade RAM, so you can start your project with lower and buy more when needed.
• Before going live you can use load testing tools like LoadImpact or similar to examine system behavior under working load.
• Optimize Apache, SQL, PHP, CMS for better performance

  Optimizing Apache

  Optimizing PHP

  Optimizing MySQL

  Optimizing Drupal

  Optimizing WordPress

  Optimizing Joomla

• Set up caching for better performance

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So what is a content management system and why is CMS web hosting important?

A content management system is very simply exactly what it states – a system that assists webmasters in maintaining and editing their content on a day-to-day basis. In the web hosting realm, using a CMS to manage your dedicated server is what many webmasters do to minimize effort and outsourcing technical support. Content management systems are designed to be as user-friendly and effortless as possible, as they are designed with the new and inexperienced webmaster in mind. So you can be sure that when you are using a content management system with dedicated web hosting that you will be able to fully maintain your website and implement new changes, add text and photos, blog and links with ease.

Some of the most popular content management systems for web hosting are Joomla, Mambo, WordPress, b2evolution, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Moveable Type, and Typo. Joomla web hosting has become extremely popular recently due to the many free Joomla extensions available, and WordPress Web Hosting is arguably the easiest CMS web hosting platform available for novice webmasters.

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For balancing the website traffic, there are several approaches. The webs servers are are one approach is to route each request in turn to a different server host address in a domain name system (DNS) table. Balancing the web server load is a procedure in which inbound internet protocol (IP) traffic can be distributed across multiple load balancing server or on the Load balancing Switch. There is multiple load balancing solution available with in the web hosting industry. There are high end Internet load balancing solution as well as load balance routers to manage online server.

In this type of balancing technique two online web servers are being used to balance the complete work load on the servers and the third server is used to determine which server to assign the work to. Since load balancing requires multiple servers, it is usually combined with fail over and backup services. In some approaches, the web server is distributed over different geographic locations. Load balancing can be implemented with hardware, software, or a combination of both. Typically, load balancing is the main reason for computer server clustering.

A Network load balancing is also a balancing technique to distribute workload equally across two or more web server, CPUs, hard drives, network links, or other resources. Which indeed to get optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. Load balancing is dividing the amount of work that a computer has to do between two or more computers so that more work gets done in the same amount of time and, in general, all users get served faster. Commonly the network load balancing can also manage popular web sites that usually get high traffic.

Load balancing enhances the performance of the web server, leads to their optimal utilization and ensures that no single server is overwhelmed. Network load balancing also helps in managing DNS servers. The large Internet Relay Chat networks, high-bandwidth File Transfer Protocol sites are also being monitor. Using multiple components with load balancing, instead of a single component, may increase scalability and reliability with redundancy. The load balancing of a service is provided by a dedicated program or hardware device (such as a multilayer switch or a DNS server). Load balancing is a procedure in which inbound internet protocol (IP) traffic can be distributed across multiple servers.

Benefits of Load Balancing:-

• Improves server performance – With the help of load balancing server the performance is achieved .The advanced load balancing technique can easily re-direct end-user service requests to the servers with the fastest response times.
• Adds Intelligence – The servers also has a feature in which it allow you to send requests for certain web pages to specific groups of servers. The special request is been done with the help of priority to the servers.
• Enhanced availability -If the online server application gets failed the load balancing can be easily redistributed by the end-user service requests to different webservers within a server farm or to servers in another location to manage the server load balancing.
• Creates Resilience – High- Availability pairs for load balancer resilience, and creates fault-tolerance for your back-end servers.
• Improves Reliability – With the help of online monitoring on the health of your web servers. The failed servers easily get detected and removed from the cluster until they recover.
• Improved flexibility and scalability – Majority of the content intensive applications has been scaled beyond the point of limits where as a single server can provide the web based client a adequate processing power.
• One-Click Session Persistence – A client is just one click away, for the sticky sessions for your web application when ever required by the.

Dedicated server hosting provides your website with the resources, reliability, security, and control not available with any other type of hosting solution. And forget the word “sharing” when you choose dedicated server hosting. Dedicated server hosting means no sharing is included in the hosting package – all of the server resources and bandwidth are yours.

Explores the benefits of dedicated server hosting

What dedicated server hosting has to offer

With a dedicated server, you get all the resources that come with your dedicated server hosting plan. Resources include hard disk space, CPU power, bandwidth – all used exclusively for your website. Forget lags, downtimes, security risks, space limits, and lack of control inevitable with other types of hosting. A dedicated server is exactly what you need when you want top performance and high-end speed and agility with your website.

First, with dedicated hosting you get total control of your server. From hardware to operating system to control panel to 3^rd party scripts – you decide what you need for your website. Next, if you are concerned about website security, rest assured that your server will be extremely secure with the help of Certified Hosting engineers and security specialists. Your website will also enjoy the unprecedented uptime only dedicated server hosting can provide, meaning your website will always be online. These are only a few features from a long list of benefits you get when you choose a dedicated hosting solution.

Make use of all the resources that come with a dedicated server

Regardless if you run a single resource-intensive ecommerce website, multiple websites, or you host a lot of media content – dedicated hosting will definitely meet and exceed your needs. Choose any of the dedicated hosting plans Certified Hosting has to offer and enjoy an enormous 10 Terabyte bandwidth that will surely provide plenty of room for your website visitors to browse and interact with your website. Regardless of which dedicated server you choose, you will get all the disk space and processor power that comes with a dedicated server in order to keep your website up and running without delays.

Advantages of choosing dedicated servers from Certified Hosting

Take advantage of an Unlimited Management Plan Certified Hosting offers with dedicated servers. Our experts take care of every aspect of server management and monitoring so you can concentrate on your website instead of managing your server. In addition to unlimited sub- domains, FTP accounts, email accounts and MySQL databases, our plan includes free installation of your 3^rd party scripts required for running your website. Toss in unlimited support requests and 24/7 expert support via phone, live chat, and ticket system and get assistance when you really need it the most.

Dedicated server hosting for top-notch website performance

Like high-end performance cars – Ferrari, Porsche, and Lamborghini – dedicated server hosting gives you the performance, blazing speeds, and complete control your website needs. If you want the best performance, uninterrupted operation, highest security, and all the resources needed to power your demanding website – a dedicated server is ideal. With a dedicated server and dedicated server hosting, you will definitely get a return on your investment and a guaranteed satisfaction as a bonus.

To learn how you can get the satisfaction of owning a dedicated server for your website with the highest performance, visit http://www.version-next.com/dedicated-servers/index.html

One of the many concerns system administrators, security experts, and free software advocates have about cloud servers or software as a service (SaaS) is that the moment they move their data to the cloud, it is out of their hands and under the control of a third party. This is a valid concern.

Once another company controls the access to and delivery of your data, you are at the whims of their shareholders. The moment they decide to pull the plug on a project or (even worse) have their plug pulled by bankruptcy, government seizure, or any other unfortunate event, you may be left with nothing.

For cloud technologies that use free and open source software, it may be rudimentary to export data. For cloud services that use proprietary data formats and closed source software, you may have no way to convert data to a useable format when moving from one to another. For that reason, it is important to investigate the company’s policies and software user agreement ahead of time, before you possibly put yourself and your business in a compromising position.

Thousands of websites and millions of pieces of private data are increasingly in one big cloud, where some of the old rules of data security are out the window.

What’s at risk?

Take the example of credit card data. Most of us don’t think twice about saving account numbers and security codes into our online shopping profiles. The Payment Card Industry (or PCI) is a global information security standard established by a consortium including Visa Card, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, that places specific requirements on the operational infrastructure that handles high-risk data like credit card information. If an infrastructure doesn’t conform to any and all PCI regulations, then it’s not PCI compliant. And because cloud infrastructure is so vastly different than that what PCI was written for, most cloud service providers are in fact, not PCI compliant.

How a cloud service provider encrypts client data is also key to security. According to Forrester cloud analyst Chenxi Wang, cloud data encryption can be scattershot. Some services encrypt their data; some don’t. For those that encrypt, it’s worth figuring out whether the encryption is strong enough, whether the physical server that stores your data is entirely encrypted (ie. is all client data encrypted the same way?) or whether the service provider offers applications that encrypt your data separately and with different keys than other stored data.

That last concern stems from a popular cloud practice: some cloud providers store data from multiple clients on the same physical server. So, Client A may be running one “virtual machine” and Client B can be running on another “virtual machine,” but both could be physically running on the same server. If an experienced hacker gains access to Client A via a security hole, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility for the hacker to gain access to Client B’s data as well. Even Client A, if they’re up to no good, could become the culprit.

“The risk of that, depending on how the cloud provider, may be minimal, or it may be quite substantial.” admits Wang. “From the absolute security stance, there is a risk that the other company who happens to rely on the same infrastructure may be able to utilize some covert terminal, or some kind of interface that’s available to actually hack into your part of the infrastructure.”

Another concern is the use of the third-party companies for various components of a cloud service. Cloud services are relying on third parties more and more.

We know recent example where third party usage has gone horribly awry. For back-up purposes, client data is often written to tapes or drives, but after a given period of time, most back-ups need to be destroyed. Recently, an unnamed cloud provider sent their back-up tapes to a data disposal company. The data disposal company lost all the tapes, and thus all the cloud client data on them.

“The cloud provider was put in a very bad situation because they don’t have any assurance the data was actually destroyed.”

Until ISPs begin fully adopting IPv6 technology, however, IP addresses will be sold at a premium. The question is: how many do you really need for your dedicated server? The answer really depends on where and how your server is hosted, the number and type of websites you are running, and how you use your server.

For a server with a single enterprise website and one central focus, a single dedicated IP may be all you need. This, however, assumes you also have nameserver IPs on another machine or from a service. If your server is housed in a remote datacenter, your nameservers may be managed by the provider. If not, you will need at least two IP addresses.

If you have more than one website, you can usually use shared IPs for most of them, unless they require SSL for ecommerce or community logins. For encrypted sites, you will need an IP for each one, if you want authenticated SSL certificates.

If you are using your server for web hosting, you may need to regularly acquire IP addresses for your customers, and you should use a service that will allow you to quickly and easily add more. Often times, you can purchase them in bulk, depending on the number you need.

It is a good idea to know ahead of time how many IP addresses you think you might want, but even if you repurpose your server at a later date, you should still be able to add more IPs without any difficulty.

I’ve seen a lot of reasons given by ESPs for why they need so many IP addresses:

1. I need at least one IP address per customer, to handle IP based reputation
2. I need many IP addresses so my MTAs can handle the volume of mail sent
3. I need many IP addresses so that I can work around ISP throttling limits
4. I need multiple IP addresses per customer so that that customer can deliver mail in a timely manner
5. I need multiple IP addresses per customer so as to manage filtering issues
6. I need multiple IP addresses in different locations to provide redundancy against network outages
7. I need multiple IP addresses in different locations so as to provide redundancy against blacklisting of my ISP

If you are a web host which is providing a responsible and sensible service, then in your terms and conditions you will probably have conditions set out regarding up uptime, which in most cases states things such as if a customer’s service is down for over a certain amount of time, or if the monthly uptime record doesn’t meet the one which is guaranteed then customers are able to request a refund; this in itself should provide you with the motivation to fix a server problem if you have set such rules out in your terms and conditions, since most companies wouldn’t want a servers worth of customers requesting refunds since they don’t think they have been provided with the amount of uptime which has been guaranteed. Most web hosts use their own internal monitoring system for their servers, since in most cases it will alert them quicker to a problem than an external solution would since an internal system is most likely monitored more closely, but with an external solution in place as backup in case the internal one fails. One thing to consider is that most external monitoring services monitor your website or server from multiple geographically different locations which means that they are able to provide a more reliable source of information when it comes to checking to see whether your VPS or dedicated server is online or not when compared to a monitoring system which is monitoring your VPS or dedicated server from one location or from one country or data center, which means that the produced results might not always be accurate and reliable.

When considering uptime solutions for your VPS or dedicated server, you should always take into consideration the effect that a program might have on the performance of your VPS or dedicated server; for example if you use an internal solution then you might need to install an ‘agent’ program which posts data about your server back to the master monitoring node, since information such as the speed that your server’s CPU is running at and the amount of memory that your server has left are factors that can only be gained by internal access to your server unlike other factors such as whether certain services are running or not that can be found out easily via pinging the port which the service runs on. You want to try and maximize the uptime of your VPS or dedicated server, which means that you should optimize the programs that you have installed on it, so that they don’t use up too many resources since the most common reason for a server crashing is that there aren’t enough resources available to keep the operating system going, which means that it just crashes because it is unable to run for any longer on the scarce resources that are available for it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, with the use of either internal or external monitoring systems, you are able to maximize the uptime of your VPS Hosting or dedicated server, thus ensuring that your customers, if you host them on your server, are happy with the service and level of uptime that you have been able to provide them with; you are also ensuring if you use your server for other purposes such as for receiving emails or for a website that emails are received as often as possible, and that visitors will still return to your website thus increasing your amount of revenue that you earn from adverts if applicable. You can also optimize your VPS or dedicated server as well as the programs that it runs to ensure that the amount of resources used is far lower, thus ensuring that you can install some more applications on your VPS or dedicated server or leave it as it is so that it is able to run fast; if running cPanel, then you can use the new optimized version since this will run much fast on a lower specification machine since it has been designed to take up less memory and utilize less CPU.

If you choose to use an internal monitoring system then you gain the ability to monitor internal factors of your server, such as the amount of CPU and memory that is available for use by the operating system and programs that you have installed on your VPS or dedicated server – this is very important if you are running a server which is hosting web hosting and design clients, since you don’t want their websites going down because of a lack of resources. Other factors which you might want to consider when choosing a monitoring system is the accuracy of the results that are collected and in turn produced; for example, with an external monitoring system you will want to be considering how spread the multiple geographical monitoring stations are and with the case of an internal monitoring system, you should find out whether internal server resources can be monitored or not – this will give you an advantage since you will be able to monitor all aspects of your server then, both internal and external which means that accurate results should be produced.

Every once life one is the time when he/she have his own game to play. In today’s market you can see allover digital games are more popular like xbox360, play station and Nintendo games capture the game markets. But can you think it why everyone likes to play online? And this base idea of dedicated server games theme.

Everyone cannot afford to buy Xbox 360, play-station or Nintendo But; current games versions available on Internet are better than to play alone. There quality display, speed is specially made to give you a high quality excitement, and these kinds of things are possible through dedicated servers.

There quality, display, speed are in particular made to give you a far above the ground quality thrill, and these kinds of things are probable through dedicated servers. If you pay money for a game DVD, how much time you play? At one period, to play that game getting so boring, this is the major reason behind popularity of online games. With lend a hand of dedicated game servers’ people can play against someone else there is no want of same play station. This is the main reason, the online game providers never end require of dedicated game servers. Network bandwidth is one the crucial part in gaming business, because it must be compulsory always in upstream. Here home or office broadband Internet connection is not plenty. Normally with this type of connection, player does not get upstream bandwidth to host out-and-out game servers more than five to ten clients, but in the past years this is the only option was available for game hosting.

Couple of years before, the player who have the game, host the server and also run the client. However, on another side, the bandwidth provider of latest broadband service, handle the outgoing traffic at same time, therefore the host computer struggled to provide a good quality of service to the players on the network, while at the same time running the game on the same computer.

However, the online game providers realized, the importance of dedicated servers, because they need professional server to read data and transferring huge amounts of data as fast as players need it, therefore they purchased rack mounted server machines and collocated them inside Data Center Services to host their games Website. They paid monthly charges for it and the services they got is invaluable, these set ups improved the quality of their games.

To know how well your website is doing you need to have access to detailed statistics about your visitors. Does your web host provide you with good, detailed statistics?

With good visitor statistics you will learn how your visitors find your website and what they do once they get there. With this knowledge it will be easier to see strengths and weaknesses in your website and marketing efforts.

A list of things to look for in a statistics package :

• Number of visitors/page views
• Views per page
• Entry/exit pages
• Visitor paths
• Referring urls
• Spider visits
• Search engine phrases
• Error pages

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