Review of Hosting Companies and Plans
How Much Hosting Do I Need: Most basic business websites use less than 1MB of disk space. A good rule of thumb is that a 10 page website with 5 images / logos on each page would be 1MB. If you have any type of e-commerce or large image galleries then you should add all the sizes of the databases to the total. For bandwidth, most typical sites would need 50,000 page views a month to reach 1G of data transfer. Also, e-mail usage is part of your bandwidth. 20,000 standard text e-mails would be about 1GB of data transfer. Attachments can add significant bandwidth. Sending 100 digital photos or large files a month could use 2MB of bandwidth a month. The Basic Hosting plan works for the majority of our customers.
Linux vs. Windows Hosting: Both work fine and the users web browser does not know the difference. We use Linux servers because they are much easier to support. Linux web servers can host most any website, even those written in Front Page. Websites developed in VB, written in ASP.net or using MS Access need to run on a windows server. Today, most developers are using PHP, which runs great on linux servers. Linux hosting is usually cheaper because of support and licensing issues.
Control Panels: today the two major web hosting control panels are Plesk (a Russian software company) and cPanel (based in Kentucky) Again, due to support (language) and licensing issues, most web hosts are using cPanel today.
Review of Hosting Companies: There's plenty to choose from. We do 'business class hosting'. That means our IP addresses are considered 'clean' by the major spam blocking companies. We don't have problems with banned web addresses. Here's a great web host review website.
Website downtime: So, IBM is the greatest technology company ever. They promote The Five 9's. That means 99.999% uptime. Quite impressive. But that really means a couple of hours downtime a year. Some of it probably planned (upgrades) and some not. Even the most major websites, managed by teams of full time expert employees, will be down on occasion. But typically, it's a 15 minute event. A couple of hours at the most. With the grid layer approach we strive to meet the challenge of IBM's incredible service levels. (and maybe even beat them)
Search Engine Optimization: Another one of our core business strategies is to have SEO friendly hosting. We don't host any websites that may get red flags from the major search engines. No spammers, no inappropriate web content, no problems. For some interesting SEO advice see the SEO-blog
The hosting industry has changed so much recently. There have been new hardware configurations, control panel vendor consolidations and unique data center designs. But the biggest change is the move to 'the cloud'. It can offer the superior reliability that is expected in the web world today.
Currently, most websites reside on a single 'shared' web server. Possibly 300 to 1,000 other websites will share one server. If one website on the sever gets a huge traffic spike, all other sites on that same server will be slowed down. It's a 'fight for resources'. If the server has a mechanical failure (power supply, disk crash, etc.) then all the websites and e-mail are down until the box is repaired or everything is transferred to a new server. That's the typical 2 - hour website down issue that we all see on occasion. Since servers are boxes full of parts (like a car) something will fail. Data centers are very good at the fire drill; server goes down, they get it back up in 15 minutes (or 2 hours) The worst case scenario it that they need to load the back up onto a new server - could take a few hours.
Now comes 'The Cloud'. Data (websites) are stored across a grid of servers. The disks are spread throughout hundreds of servers and when one box dies (and they all do eventually) the data is still live across the remaining servers. However, even better is how they handle traffic spikes. If one website gets a major traffic spike, it's bandwidth does not affect your site.
Did you ever need to upgrade your hosting plan? Migrating an entire website to another hosting provider is a bunch of work - and some downtime. With grid layer hosting it's simple to add capacity or bandwidth. Just submit a support ticket, or phone call, and we can 'dial up' your capacities. Nothing changes - no server migration - no hassle. This is a support guy's dream.....