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Kenny is owner of webhostpark and has been working in hosting industry since 2006. We provide unbiased hosting reviews and release the latest promo news. Follow me on Google plus

6Scan Reviews

Website security is top concern by business groups. And because of the fast tech development, hackers are more and more active to find out vulnerabilities on our websites. It's not rare to hear about various hacking events thus it forces webmasters to tighten their website security by any solution they can found. Today let's check out one of the leading website protection solutions – 6Scan.

6Scan Introduction

6Scan(www.6scan.com) is a team of ex-military security experts who have implemented traditional expensive and complicated website security solutions. 6scan is also one of the very earliest solutions for website protection. The mission of 6scan is to provide an affordable and reliable website protection to both enterprise and personal webmasters. Till present, 6scan is partnered with lots of reputable IT groups and securing more than 10 millions websites.

6Scan provides total of 3 service plans – Basic, professional and enterprise with different features such as scanning depth and frequency etc. The basic plan is configured for daily frequency with up to 100 pages while it's hourly with unlimited pages for enterprise plan.

What's actually good of 6scan?

To learn the advantages, let's first check how it works and what kind of tasks can be done with it. The 6scan is simply a light weight scanner on your website after installed. It will communicate with host server for up to date vulnerabilities collection then scan your configured website. Once the security guard is turnned on, it will auto complete the following essential tasks:

SQL Injection
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
CSRF
Directory traversal
Remote file inclusion
Several DoS conditions

Once vulnerabilities found, it will send SMS or email notification then apply auto fix if possible. As we see, it's more than a simple scanner but a problem fixing engine with 100% automation. Very few security products have managed doing so. You have option to receive scanning reports by SMS or email. You will see how those hacking attempts happened and fixed. For example if someone tried to hack into your admin panel by various user id/password, 6scan will detect the user IP address and block it for some periods to stop their hacking attempts. The product even provide an auto secure backup service where your site and database will be auto backed up on server and you can apply quick restoration from specific date.

Website Plugin

From the very beginning, we have to add our site from 6scan dashboard once signed up the service. But their tech team has simplified their service by plugins. As more than 20% websites are developped by wordpress today, 6scan team has programmed a wordpress plugin called "6scan protection" with all features included. Just download the plugin from wordpress official gallery then install/activate by few steps. The plugin is pretty light weight so your wordpress site performance won't be affected. Just make an initial configuration and you're all set, the service will running background based your configuration parameter and keep your data in safe place.

Plugins for other popular website softwares are also planned as suggested by its official team. Joomla, drupal and other popular cms softwares are mentioned in their list.

Web Hosting Integration

6Scan has partnered with multiple reputable hosting providers to have the service configured on server end directly. In this way, hosting users don't have to apply it one by one for different websites. Take arvixe(www.arvixe.com) for example, 6scan is installed on all servers and available in each clients' control panel center. Just navigate to the security section and activate the service then your entire account will be secured/protected. All configuration parameters are just provided the same from control panel.

What would be the weakness of the service?

Seriously? price might be the huge weakness. The starter price $9.99/mo per single site might be non-affordable choice for personal webmaster as it's more than hosting service investment. They indeed provides some discounts from partner sites but it's still a little expensive. However, regardless the paying amount, people get free scan opportunity before you decide to pay. So it's pretty fair service. There's nothing to blame at all based all benefits it brings.

Basically, with 6scan service you don't need an antivirus or antimalware product. So it actually helps reduce your investment from other security solutions. If you need super reliable and easy website protection, 6scan is highly recommended solution.

A2 Hosting Reviews

About A2 Hosting Group

A2 Hosting is a privately owned web hosting company with rich feature hosting plans configured on leading server structures. The company was known as Iniquinet before 2001 and renamed to current brand in 2003. Their name a2 is simply based their physical address "Ann Arbor" in Michigan. The mission of A2 hosting is to deliver super reliable and high performance service to individual and enterprise web applications.

A2 Hosting Plans Features

A2 Hosting provides pretty standard web hosting plans including shared, vps, reseller and dedicated hosting. The company highlight their service by offering leading server features and performance for each clients. Unlike all other hosting groups who just provides 99% server uptime guarantee in simple words, A2 hosting shows all their server status publicly on website so visitors can judge by themselves how their servers are performing.

Basically, the A2 hosting servers uptime stats is 99+%. They managed doing so simply because of their powerful hardware specs and advanced management technologies. All their servers are brand new DELL products with cloudlinux installation. The most important is they don't oversell the server space so all their efforts can produce out expected results. The A2 hosting leading plan features are provided as following

Unlimited offers
Most features from A2 hosting are provided unlimited like most popular providers. Account storage, data transfer, domains/subdomains, database and email accounts etc are provided with no limitation. As long as you're not flooding your account space, you can use as more as you can.

Developer friendly
A2 is absolutely one of the most developer friendly hosting provider. Every server is installed 4 versions php and most programming frameworks like perl, ruby on rails, postgresql and python etc. SSH is also supported for each customer account so you can connect to server space directly via command line.

Fast server speed
Just like what they explained on their hosting site, they use the same server for hosting their own website. Their efforts in speeding up hosting servers including 10 GB redundant networks, 8 core server, minimum 24 GB RAM plus free Cloud Flare CDN support, Railgun Optimizer (load HTML 140+ % faster), and multiple server locations between U.S. and E.U. A2 is also one of the very few hosting service who uses SSD drive which is approved to be 300% faster than traditional hard disk.

Server rewind
Server Rewind helps easily restore your data from saved snapshots when recovery is necessary. The service is accessible from hosting control panel and provided 100% free! You can recovery a single file or entire account by few clicks. The service is running background automatically so you don't have to manually configure it. Just call it when you need to recover something.

Affordable price
A2 hosting service can be as cheap as $3.95/mo for 36 months subscription. Yearly subscription for prime plan is only $4.97/mo after official 17% discount! Pretty affordable! Please note, SSD support is not configured as default, you can either sign up via additional $3/mo or sign up Prime+SSD plan which has SSD included for free.

Besides all above advantages, A2 hosting is also one of the very few affordable SSD vps provider. You can fully customize your SSD vps setup to fulfill your server requirements. Means you don't pay extra for something you don't need so each penny will put on the service you need exactly.

A2hosting official site: http://www.a2hosting.com

About A2 Hosting Support

A2 Hosting claims that all staff are developers and available 24/7 every day of the year. Instead to put all support staff into an office, they take home based work environment as part of their green strategy. Their free work style is very similar to arvixe hosting who even doesn't have a headquater.

A2 provides hosting support in multiple channels including toll-free phone calls, live chat and ticket. Their people also constructed a resourceful FAQ knowledge base and very active in social media communities like twitter, facebook and various web forums. All their effort is to make the support simple and easy.

Do we recommend?

Basically, There's no much difference in common service features comparing to lots of popular hosting groups. The biggest advantage with A2 is their leading server setup and no overselling policy. Besides all available features from traditional hosting service, they even proudly show up all server on going uptime stats to approve their confidence in maintaining a powerful and healthy server. A2 is highly recommended hosting when you need high performance web server and quick file recovery service.

Last but not least, don't forget they provide very affordable deal for each service plan. Starts from 17%, you can always claim the best price without searching anywhere else outside their official site.

Is VPS better than Shared Server?

VPS is considered an upgrade option of shared hosting when you need more than a shared server can offer. Especially when you need better performance on your business site, VPS is always suggested by most professionals. Is VPS server really working better than shared hosting? What we should know about before makeing the final decision? We're going to reveal the secret and check when you really need a VPS service.

Ideally, a vps server is allocated with dedicated resource from host server and it can be only used by your applications. But it's not always working like this in real world. There're simply too many virtualization solutions that will result in different quality servers. For example, many server providers create vps using OpenVZ. Being an open sourced platform, OpenVZ is widely installed for quick virtual server setup. However, the problem with this software is it can be over sold easily. Unlike most other commercial solutions that are strictly limited by license, server providers can easily edit the openvz kernel then create more than limited numbers vps instance.

Another weak point of openvz is about performance. All VPS servers share the same hardware resources. Especially on CPU and network load, as long as one server uses more then the rest servers can only get limited resources to share. Means if there's one server overloading, then all vps servers will be affected on the same host server.

As about shared hosting server, it's always extremely optimized via leading configurations by hosting group. Because there're lots of clients on a single server, they know the importance to maintain a healthy server environment so they have tried almost everything they can to setup a powerful and reliable hosting server. There's also daily backup and live monitoring applied to ensure its performance and security. Generally speaking, a well maintained share hosting server has more than required hardware resources so even after you overloaded the limits you are still safe. As about website performance, you can't really tell if it will be better on vps unless you have purchased a high standard server.

When do you have to get a vps server?

There're many reasons you select vps option, but you have to use a vps for below conditions

You need to install something that's not possible under shared hosting environment.
You need to test website compatibility and debug lively on production server environment.
You need better security protection and aovid the crowd shared environment.
You need quick problem fix when your website down and don't want to wait for hosting help.

There're more reasons to sign up vps. But you must evaluate the most important point and check if it's worth the try. The biggest advantage is you have full control of all server services so you can configure everything as you like, you do not receive this support from a shared hosting.

How to select the right VPS service?

As explained from above, different vps platform will generate different performance. If you're going to host a busy web application that requires high reliability, it's quite important to select the right server plan. Technically, openvz is not suggested unless you just sign up for practice purpose. For business website, XEN, KVM and virtuozzo are perfect choice. If you need windows vps server, hyper-v should be primarily considered because its provided by microsoft itself. Moreover, budget vps service is not suggested either for business site no matter how good it's advertised. For good and reputable vps service, this top 5 vps hosting list is good source to follow.

Best alternative choice of VPS

After you outgrew a shared server you have lots of choice to go instead using VPS server. Many hosting companies provide a service similar to VPS called "Business hosting" or enterprise hosting. It's still on shared server but just shared by much few clients. The actual server performance is much better than a average vps. The big advantage with this service is you don't have to maintain the server by yourself. It's still operated by hosting support team so you can sleep well at midnight.

For high performance and security business hosting solutions, we highly suggest check out arvixe who can provide both windows and linux plans with leading features. The arvixe business hosting might be a little expensive comparing to their budged shared hosting service, but you get what you pay. The extra fees generate 10 times more value and simplified your web hosting experience.

Check out arvixe business hosting details from http://www.arvixe.com

Top 10 Dedicated Server Hosting

Dedicated servers provides the best performance and scalability for your enterprise IT applications. Dedicated server can be setup by following your exact requirements so you have full control about its overall costs. It's easy to get a server service from the huge provider list, but you have to evaluate carefully and select the right server provider. We have compiled a list of the top 10 dedicated server hosting providers by professionals experience and existing user comments. They're rated in the list based it's data center specs, connectivity, server structures and price. No matter if you need to host big applications or just use it for network or storage purpose, you can always get a solution from the list below.

RackSpace
Started in 1998, rackspace is the most well known server provider who has been leading in dedicated server and cloud solutions. Their people also developped the mostly used cloud server managing platform "Openstack". Till present, rackspace manages total of 6 global data centers in USA, Europe, Asia and Austrilia. Rackspace combines public cloud, private cloud, and dedicated bare metal computing to provide the perfect infrastructure for each customer's specific needs. Server price might be a little high from rackspace but you get what you pay.

Rackspace official site: http://www.rackspace.com

SoftLayer
The biggest data center provider who is powering hundreds of reputable hosting brands. Softlayer manages data center space from almost every states in USA. All available leading network/computing groups have partnership with SL to generate the best server service. Especially after acquired by IBM company, softlayer can upgrade their systems by leading IBM solutions. Because the company provides a variety server plans with different setup features, you can always get a perfect server with your needs.

Softlayer official site: http://www.softlayer.com

LiquidWeb
Liquid Web Inc. is a privately held managed web hosting company founded in 1997, with three wholly owned data center facilities and 13,000 Servers located in Lansing, Michigan. From it's own stats report, liquid Web has over 20,000 clients served in over 120 countries. It's also selected to fortune 5000 list every year since 2007. Besides its leading dedicated server plans, liquid web also provides all traditional hosting solutions including shared, VPS and managed service plans. The most popular web hosting forum site "webhostingtalk" is hosted by Liquidweb.

LiquidWeb official site: http://www.liquidweb.com

Krypt
Krypt was founded in 1998 as a shell and web hosting provider out of Newport Beach, CA. The company was best known for providing some of the best Counter-Strike game servers on the west coast from 2000 – 2005. Krypt has two of the best rated data centers in California – Santa Ana and Los Angeles. The KR server starts at $84.95/mon with free support for windows and linux. To most their users, speedy and stability are mostly talked about with Krypt servers.

Krypt official site: http://krypt.com

FDCServers
One of the largest dedicated server providers who manages over 10 data centers from both USA and Europe. It's also one of the very few server providers who provides multiple languages support to clients from different locations. It's especially optimized for Chinese clients and ranked in top 300 websites list in that area. FDCServers provides VPS, dedicated server and colocation service with very affordable price.

FDCServers official site: http://fdcservers.net

QuadraNet
A leading server provider since 2001. Unlike any other server hosting service, user can find any kind server configuration from quadranet company. The company also provides a full range services including storage server, CDN/DNS hosting, backup and server management service. Especially after pacificrack joined the group, it made quadranet a big server provider in short time. QuadraNet mainly operates from 3 data centers: Dallas, Miami and Los Angeles

QuadraNet official site: http://www.quadranet.com

100TB
100TB is one of the UK2 sub brands. Like their domain name suggests, 100TB is specialising in on-demand scalable-bandwidth server service. If you're operating a heavy traffic website and in need of decent server service, 100TB is highly suggested. Actually, it's hard to find another server provider for such big offer in bandwidth and disk drives. 100TB servers are powered by over 20 data centers all over the world as suggested by UK2.

100TB official site: http://www.100tb.com

SharkTech
SharkTech is most famous for its ddos protection firewalls. Since 2003, the company has been offering high-transfer server hosting to both IT professionals and enterprises. In order to guarantee the best performance and security, Sharktech setup modern data centers in Chicago and Denver. Each data center is supported by multiple reputable network backbones and hardware vendors.

Sharktech official site: http://www.sharktech.net

BurstNET
One of the most well known budget server providers who can offer leading server configurations with affordable price. With a lower price you get a powerful server configuration that's only provided from larger packages by other hosting companies. Being one of the largest server providers, burstNET operates from multiple centers in USA and UK. Most popular IT groups have partnership with them in offering leading server service.

BurstNET official site: http://www.burst.net

SolidTools
A less popular server provider who operates multiple data centers all over the world. The BGP network is specially optimized for eastern Asia area like Japan, Korea and China. Main service by solidtools includes cloud VPS, dedicated servers and colocation. Their website is probably the simplest one from all their competitors, what really makes their service outstanding is their enterprise grade server facilities and service.

Solidtools official site: http://solidtools.com

Better server performance or customer support?

28 October 2013
by: Kenny
in: Blog
note: no comments

When we evaluate a hosting service, there're two most important points – server performance and customer support. They're always considered the golden partner. But what if we can just get one? Which will you choose? It seems strange but the truth is it does happen often in hosting industry. We can't always get everything as expected. This article will provide you guides based editorial experience.

Server performance is absolutely the most important for hosting service. Once you put your site online, you always want to get fast and stable loading. But a fast server is not so easy to get unless you get a vps or full dedicated server. Because of the competitive business, most hosting providers trying to set very low price for their shared hosting service. But they still need to be profitable, they have no choice but to purchase outdated hardwares or simply oversell the server space. The result is hosting server will be more and more busy by heavy traffic

A high performance server always comes with high price. In order to provide leading uptime and loading speed, the hosting group will apply reliable hardware production and place it in reputable data center space. They also need to apply leading server monitoring system and keep it always online. The investment is not cheap at all.

Ideally, the leading performing hosting server should provide the same level support but it's not always working in the way. The simple logic is the server products already very expensive so hosting groups do not want to get more support staffs with extra investment. It's common to see a big hosting group with very few support staff. Our clients experienced such issue from A small orange hosting. ASO is a reputable hosting provider for its leading performance and rich feature plans. But you can't imagine how many people work there. One of our clients got website down and waited 1 day with no response in ticket. The ASO support finally responded and showed their carefulness. Their support leader also revealed they have very limited support technicians so couldn't respond so efficiently.

How do we think a hosting is offering quality support? Most of the time we judge from the support availability. For example if the company can always pick up your calls then most probably you'll be satisfied. However, you might have found most support in contact are sales representative and level 1 technicians. They are more professional in selling their service to you and redirecting to the next level people. Many hosting groups announce to provide 24*7 live support to show up their abilities in serving your requests. But they never mentions most front line support is for sales and only one or two tech professionals behind.

Don't think they're useless, at least they will let you calm down when you're upset with service problems. Especially when you have been tracking down an issue for long time, you feel much better if you can always keep in touch with support no matter if they can solve your problem in short time. Because at least you know someone is working on it but not ignoring their clients. As we see, a friendly and customer caring support is quite helpful to save your business. Especially when you like to convince your customer for recuring payment, customer support is playing an very important role. For those services with high rate second purchase, there're always powerful support teams behind. It might be easy to get an order but you have to work more hard in keeping the business for long.

Most of the time, we purchase a service not only because it meets all our technical requirements. On user end, there're simply too many options with similar features. What really makes their service different is on support features. No people can go with a best rated server without support. There's no such patience when their online business is put offline.

VPS vs Dedicated Server

VPS or dedicated server will always be considered when you website grows up. Dedicated server absolutely wins from technical view. But what's exactly good for either product? We have generated a list of comparison between vps and dedicated server with both pros and cons to help with your quick selection.

In order to understand the difference and relationship between the two products, we will focus on following essential points that are mostly concerned by people: server structure, performance, security and costs.

Server structure

A dedicated server is composed by physical hardware resources such as hard drives, RAM card, CPU and power source etc. You have full control of the physical server with complete access to all its resources. As long as the server is setup by your requirements, you can make full use of all available facilities.

VPS is different. While a dedicated server is completely configured on physical hardwares, vps is just created by virtualization softwares like openvz and hyper-v etc. Everything is virtualized from existing server resources. Unlike a dedicated server where you can touch the server hardware directly by hand, everything from vps is non-touchable, you can only see its configuration from virtualization platform.

Performance

A dedicated server has its own physical resources and always can be added in case there's need. No matter how you utilize the resource, you'll not be affected by other people.

A vps server performance completely depends the host server configuration. For example if it has 8GB RAM installed, then the max amound to allocate to vps can never by pass this limit. Because there're always multiple vps instance created on host server, all vps servers are sharing the same dedicated resources. When any of the vps instance uses more, there's less resource left for others. Some critical resources like disk I/O and network bandwidth is strictly limited by host server abilities. If all vps servers are generating big amounts traffic during peak times this can cause some performance degradation or even down time.

Security

For those who require extremely high security protection, dedicated server is absolutely perfect choice. Because everything will be stored on your dedicated server and only you have root access to it. Unless your physical server is stolen from data center space, everything can be secured properly via existing security tactics. The 100% physical resource isolation feature greatly reduced potential security issues that're common from other systems.

VPS is great too but absolutely not so powerful as dedicated server. Because it's virtualized from host server resources by software. Server administrators have full access to every vps. As long as the host server is hacked, all vps platforms are actually dead. Even there's no such hacking issue, you don't wish host support to access your server space either in case you keep something really great in the space.

We had a client who sells commercial dotnetnuke skins and modules before, he tried shared and vps but he always found his property being compromised by other people. He then switched to dedicated server and no such issue happened. I can't say if it's the problem of host company or just because of a powerful hacker. But a dedicated server solved the problem perfectly.

Costs

Dedicated server is much more expensive than vps for all its advantages. No matter what kind of dedicated server you would like to deal with, it will always cost you more than vps solutions because you get all dedicated resource. VPS is affordable choice before you have to use a dedicated server. You get a full functional server system as well with allocated resources.

Here's a table list view between vps and dedicated server

Server plan	VPS	Dedicated
Hardware	virtualized from dedicated server	100% physical hardware
Server OS	limited choice	any system can be supported
Security	medium	high
Performance	good	perfect
Flexibility	you can optimize a specific service for vps by application needs without paying that much for a dedicated server
Cost	low	high

Although VPS is not so powerful as a dedicated server, it's good service to practise your server management skills before you work with a dedicated version. A VPS is configured full functional like a dedicated server so you can learn server services side by side. Also, with the fast tech development, most server products are going cloud. Most cloud servers are actually created as VPS with flexible resource and performance. When you evaluate if to work with a vps or dedicated server, make sure to check about your future growth and needs.

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