Web Hosting: 4 Factors in Choosing a Hosting Company When choosing a web hosting company there are a whole lot of different factors that should go into your decision making process. One of the biggest factors should be:
1) Phone support. Email support is nice, but email occasionally falls in between the virtual cracks. Getting someone on the phone when your site goes down can take a lot of mystery out of the entire process. A lot of the bigger web hosting companies offer toll free support and weekend hours to boot. Phone support is a great benefit for any web hosting client.
2)Another factor to use in deciding whether to use a particular web hosting company is their history. How long has this company been in business? Web hosting companies that have been in existence for less than a year might not be the best choice. A hosting company with a proven track record and a ton of happy clients is certainly a good sign and might work well for you.
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| Plan Details | |
| Plan: | Nomonthlyfee Hosting |
| Plan URL: | |
| Plan Type: | Shared |
| Platform: | Windows |
| Price Per Month: | 0.00 |
| Price Per Year: | 0.00 |
| Setup Fee: | 49.95 |
| Non-Profit Discount: |  |
| Disk Space (MB): | 110 |
| Extra Disk Space: | $0.20 per MB |
| Bandwidth Allowed: | 10 GB |
| Extra Bandwidth: | $0.50 per GB |
| Backup Frequency: | Daily |
| Account Setup Time: | within 10 minutes |
| Minimum Contract: | No minimum |
| Money Back Guarantee: | 30 |
| Email Accounts: | Unlimited |
| Email Autoresponders: | Unlimited |
| Email Aliases: | |
| Web-Based Email: | |
| Account Features | |
| Databases Supported: | MySQL Access MS SQL |
| Server Component List: | Red Hat Linux 7.x, Apache 1.3.x, WuFTPd, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, Webalizer, MySQL, Perl 5.x, Sendmail, tcp wrappers, gnu tar, Webmin, zip/unzip compression utilities, FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions |
| Control Panel: | |
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| Adult Content Allowed: | |
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| Raw Logs Available: | |
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| Java Virtual Machine: | |
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| Network and Servers | |
| Connection Speed: | Multiple OC12 |
| Server Hardware: | Sun & Cisco |
| Server Software: | RedHat, UNIX, IIS |
| Sites per Server: | 150 |
| Technical Support | |
| Business Hours: | 247 |
| Technical Support Hours: | 247 |
| 24 Hour Technical Support: | |
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Webfarms II: Balancing The Load. Okay, so you understand webfarms now. What's the magic that actually distributes the load, and how does it determine how the distribution is handled?
At ORCS Web we use the Foundry Server Iron products to perform our webfarm load-balancing. If one of them fails, the other instantly takes over (In our testing, it had sub-second fail-over!)
So what is this "Server Iron" thing? In simplest terms, it's a layer 4-7 switch. It has multiple network ports on it and can be used literally like other types of switches. But, it can also load-balancing and traffic distribution. A VIP (virtual IP) can be assigned to the SI (Server Iron) and it then handles all traffic sent to that address/VIP. Further configuration is done to tell the SI what to actually do with the traffic sent to the VIP address.
The traffic that hits the VIP on the Server Iron is of course redistributed to a number of server nodes so the client request can be satisfied - that's the whole point of a webfarm. If one or more server nodes are not responding, the switches are able to detect this and send all new requests to servers that are still online - making the failure of a server node almost transparent to the client.
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