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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

MariaDB Hosting

mariadb hosting

Looking for high performance database engine to support your website? You might be surprised for the limited choice. Most developer and webmasters install either mysql or sql server to work with. But today, we'll introduce another leading database engine – MariaDB.

MariaDB Introduction

MariaDB is 100% open sourced database that's released under GPL license. The project is supported by a huge community and everybody be able to contribute to each new release. The name MariaDB is named after the project leader's younger daughter – Maria. The latest version is MariaDB 5.5.30

The purpose of MariaDB is to provide a responsive, cross platform compatible and high performance database engine to small and large applications. The Maria project early members are mostly from Mysql community. The community keep each release the same as mysql version, for example MariaDB 5.1.47 while there's MySQL 5.1.47

MariaDB Web Hosting

Comparing to all other database systems, mariaDB is very new. But it's already installed by lots of popular groups like Wikipedia and Google because of its high performance and abilities in handling large data transfer. However, it's hard to find a regular hosting plan with MariaDB support. Most hosting servers are still Mysql powered for it's long historical popularity. If you are web developer and would like to use MariaDB, you need to get a VPS or dedicated server then install the database software. It's free to get and just the same way of mysql installation. You wouldn't get a single problem to have it setup and running perfectly.

MariaDB has very low server end requirement so you can easily on a budget or enterprise server system. If you're looking for a decent VPS server plan, we highly suggest the best 5 vps hosting list. If you only like to try out MariaDB on live server system with less investment, the vps under $10/mo page is suggested.

MariaDB vs Mysql

The mariaDB project is announced to be drop-in replacement of mysql and improved a lot for its storage engines. Below is a list comparison of the two softwares.

  • Development. The mysql core development is limited from Oracle group while MariaDB is completely opened to everybody. That means mariaDB can be improved fastly by more professionals. Especially when referring to security, mariadb can be more reliable because you know how it's configured in source codes.
  • Structure. MariaDB uses different sotrage engines than mysql and each engine is drop-in replacement. Their PBXT, XtraDB and FederatedX engines are recognized more efficient than mysql engines with less bug/warning.
  • Performance. Both are high performance database solutions but mariadb is more advanced system which can be recognized deeply optimized mysql. Because the mariadb core developers are actually from mysql group, they fully understand how mysql is orgnized so they can fix lots of weakness to their new products release. Because of the maria improved storage engines, it's used on lots of enterprise solutions by wikipedia and google.

Official comprison between mariadb and mysql: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-versus-mysql-features/

Web Hosting Fake Order Solutions

web hosting fake order solutions

Fake order is a big pain for most business. Especially for online business like web hosting service, it's pretty easy to place multiple fake orders and abuse your billing system. It brings us lots of problems for order and client management, we have to spend lots of man power to deal with such spam. Because of this, many hosting providers introduced various solutions to avoid/reduce fake orders. We have collected the following most popular actions. Let's see how they're working and how it will help.

Email Verification

More and more hosting providers require people to register first in order to place an order. There's a form with several MUST fill in blanks during registration like home address, phone number and email etc. Once done registration, users are requested to verify from contact email or else it will be deleted after some periods. It's probably the most efficient method to reduce spam orders because a spammer does not have that much patience to complete the order process and submit their personal details to hosting provider.

On user end, it might be a little complex to get registered. But it's definitely helpful to build a clean environment.

Credit card verification

This includes two parts, credit card payment and credit card number verification. In order to stop fraud, many hosting companies only accept credit card payment. Paypal – one of the most famous payment solutions, is not supported because spammer can request charge back. This will bring untrustness to hosting group from paypal end and there're lots of potential negative effects to their business. Credit card does not have such issues. The order form will auto check if your card number is valid or not. If the spammer just enter some nonsensical numbers, he can not pass through the order process.

It's great solution for hosting provider. However it might stop many potential clients because a large number of people still prefers to paypal for it's convenience. Unless hosting provider is pretty confident about their service, it's not good solution because hosting is a very competitive business today.

Phone call verification

Similar to email verification but just handled manually by company staff. When you place an order, it'll be on hold before got approved. During this period, their staff members will call people to verify the order then approve it. Of course, not every order will be processed like this, especially when you receive 10s and thousands orders per day. The manual action is only triggered when the system detects something unusual. For example when your billing and home address are different on the order. We received such experience from justhost company because of this. The letter we received as below

We require some further verification regarding your order due to our increased security measures on our credit card orders. We do apologize that sometimes legitimate cards get flagged up for this, but it is a necessary procedure.

Please could you email us a copy of the front of the credit card (please mask any of the details that you wish to except the name and last 4 digits of the card number) and the card holder’s passport or driving license to confirm the payment. Please email this to us as soon as you can so that we can finalize your order.

Phone call verification is popularly added for dedicated server products. Because most people require custom setup, server providers must ensure the order validity so they can provide the right products to people. Actually, for custom server setup, email communication is always included between user and provider.

IP Identification

It's common to see many hosting groups blocked some popular spam IP locations. They will verify or even don't accept orders from some specific areas based their historical issues. Orders from these locations will be on hold firstly till the management team verified. The most popular action is many hosting groups do not accept orders from Iran, although it's not for spam consideration, it tells us it's doable from technical configuration.

Ecommerce requires quick and easy check out to save website visitors. All above solutions are actually creating barriers for better ROI. While fake orders prohibited, service providers are loosing business because the non-friendly system. So hosting providers must evaluate carefully based their own situations. It's important to block fraud orders but it's also important to give our clients better experience.

How is bad web hosting produced?

how is bad web hosting produced?

When you look for potential web hosting provider, it's obvious everybody would like to get a reliable service for life. We always have to get advice from professionals on webmaster forums then try to avoid those "bad web hosting". The problem is, how bad they're? How is a bad web hosting produced?

I'm sure every web hosting group would like to do business well by best efforts. It's just impossible they start a business then try to destroy everything. They might never thought to fail a single website and have tried everything they could to save your business. However they're still recognized "bad" by many users. Why is that? Here's a list of possible reasons.

Over advertising

Hosting is a competitive business and many companies over advertised their service to attract more people. For example they advertise unlimited service everywhere but they only provide such feature from the highest plan for extra costs. Users might subscribe based their advertisement directly but being charged more.

Non-flexible service

Some providers just offer services as listed on site and not willing to make a small customization. For example in order to tighten the global server security, many hosting providers set very strict limits on php variables such as upload and memory size limits and don't allow overriding. However, sometimes the value is simply too small to work with but hosting company does not wish to make a change.

Less support

Probably the mostly complained point. Many providers grow up rapidly in short periods, however they can't keep up with hardware and support. Just imagine how will a 2 to 3 support team can provide high quality support to their clients? Don't be surprised to wait hours or days for problem fixing. Even you call in by hotline, they're still dealing with multiple customers and couldn't concentrate on your account.

Above might be the main problems from hosting company end. However, most of the time, we, the actual users are producing problems by our own and we are just not awared. If we search out some complaints with a hosting company we will see many problems are even not hosting related. Following problems are actually should be resolved by ourselves.

Hosting compatibility

We always don't read their hosting plan and AUP/TOS carefully but just concentrate on price. If we are going to host a heavy traffic website like forum or shopping cart, a budget shared hosting plan is definitely not right choice. Basically, such service is only prepared for small site purpose such as personal blog and product showcase. Extra traffic means extra server resources be used, we must evaluate seriously about what kind of service we need. The right choice means half success.

Scripts debug

Our website is our property and we should support ourselves by fixing any kind problem as much as we can. If it's programming issues, we need to fix on our end. Hosting support might help based their plenty experience. However, we can't blame them if they can't fix because we programmed the application by ourself. When we worked for a hosting group before, we got multiple heavy complaints because we refuse to support such requests. On hosting company end, they prefer not to serve your websites instead spending hours or days to fix such problems.

Over using

Unlimited is liked by everyone but it's just a marketing term as we explained many times before. The real limits for different service plans are also revealed based our work experience. But many people just don't listen to it and use their account space as dedicated server. No hoster like to serve such customer no matter how hard you complain.

As we see, we can't say a hosting is bad because people experienced. There's no really bad web hosting, we just need to find the most suitable service for website. As long as it worked well then we may rate it as the best web hosting because it's just working perfect to us.

Best Exchange Server hosting & Alternative

exchange server hosting

Exchange server or microsoft exchange is a mail program devloped by microsoft. Since from the initial release, it's considered the best enterprise mail solution. Till exchange server 2013, it's included as one of the office 365 services though you can install it independently. Exchange server provides a list of advantages that you can not get from any other product. Those outstanding features include the following

  • Get business email, calendar, and contacts on your PC, phone, and web browser.
  • Run email on Microsoft globally redundant servers.
  • Stay protected by anti-malware and anti-spam filters and supported by 24/7, IT-level phone support.

Exchange server is fully mobile compatible for all its features. People get both web access as well as email client access based your preference. The newest exchange server outlook interface is fully integrated with office so you can beautify email contents easily. Another great feature of the product is group meeting. Users can compare calendars to schedule meetings and can access collaboration features, including shared calendars, groups, the global address list, external contacts, tasks, conference rooms, and delegation capabilities.

Best Exchange Server Hosting

A lot of hosting providers offer exchange server plans. Some providers like Godaddy, rackspace and amazon all support exchange hosting with different price and features. However, the best exchange server hosting provider is absolutely microsoft. It's their own product and they provide the service directly on website. The best feature of microsoft service is their global data centers on every continents. You don't have to worry about service failure because of a single server crash because there're lots of redundant servers behind.

For the moment, microsoft provides two exchange server plans and single user service just starts at $4/mon. Each user gets 50 GB of mailbox storage and can send messages up to 25 MB in size. For $8/mo plan you get unlimited storage and voice mail support! Such service is not available from any other providers.

exchange server price

We should note that all exchange server hosting plans are dedicated for email service. Means no matter how much space you get, you can only use for email contents but not other purpose such as website. There's no support for other services.

Best Exchange Server Alternative

As explained from above, microsoft exchange server provides unbeatable features for all other email solutions. However, it's not cheap to get started. Unless your company highly relies on email communication with extremely high requirements to this service, many people will not consider it. But what if we need similar service with less costs? Yes, there's a product called "smartermail" which is almost designed the same as exchange server. Their official proudly to announce its the best alternative of microsoft exchange.

The advantage of smartermail is you have free try out opportunity before paying. Their free edition support a single domain with up to 10 mail boxes with no feature limitation. If your requirement is just like this, you can always use it for free! Since it's a stand alone windows software, we can easily setup it on vps or dedicated servers, just few clicks away and the installer will auto configure all needed environment without manual action.

Till present, there're multiple reputable windows hosting providers use smartermail for their email system like winhost, hostgator. They both configured enterprise edition smartermail on separate windows servers and provide the service for free to all clients. You can check the following video for further details.

Smartermail is also the best choice when you would like to get control over all your web properties, you just need to install the software on server end then provide mail access to company staff. All mails and traffic details are stored on your server hard drives and no one can access to it except youself.

Smartermail official site: http://www.smartertools.com

Semi Dedicated Hosting or VPS

semi dedicated hosting

We have multiple choice after website outgrew regular shared web hosting service, like VPS and dedicated server. Several other options are also provided before you have to get a server. Semi dedicated hosting is one of the most popular choice. How is the service being offered? Is it better than VPS or dedicated server hosting?

The term Semi dedicated always guides people to VPS but they work in completely different ways. Following is an indepth comparison between semi dedicated hosting and VPS server.

  • Performance. VPS provides better performance since you receive guaranteed server resources. You have full access to configure server end service by your best practice skills. Semi dedicated hosting is completely managed by hosting provider. We just get more server resources to support the extra traffic on website.
  • Hosting Features. Semi dedicated hosting brings more features than VPS. A semi dedi service simply works the same way as regular shared server with even more features provided such as separated servers for database, website and email. We also receive extra support for some specific service like dedicated IP and SSL certificate. A VPS server is just a basic server system and we have to configure most stuff by our own.
  • Server Access. We don't get server root access for semi dedi hosting but we do for vps server. We only get a hosting control panel via semi dedi service or probably get limited SSH access to server space but it's not possible to get root permission. Instead, we fully control over vps server including OS.

The above difference is caused by the different server configuration. While vps is virtualized from host server, the semi dedi is 100% located on physical server system, no virtualization included. That's the main difference comparing to a vps server. So basically it's a upgrade of shared hosting but with the same management.

Who provides semi dedicated hosting plan? Actually very few hosting providers offer this service nowadays, the semi dedi term was popular in the past. If you're looking for this service for the moment, siteground is the best choice. Their server specification and hosting features are even better than most vps servers.

The siteground Gogeek semi dedicated hosting service is configured on these server specifications: RAID10, SAS HDD, MySQL on separate SSD, 24 CPU cores and many other leading server features. They guarantee 4 times more server resource than regular shared service. They also configured the semi dedicated server for PCI Compliant plus a free SSL for the first year.

Go to siteground and view plan details http://www.siteground.com

Because semi dedicated is an old term, based all its features and advantages, more hosting providers offer similar service on enterprise or business hosting plans. Most of those hosting plans are configured with similar features. They announce to put less customer accounts on server space to generate better performance on customer websites, they also provide extra support such as priority backup and extra bonus for website hosting. The best experience we have for business hosting service is from Arvixe(www.arvixe.com) and we actually use it for the moment. Our website webhostpark is hosted on their business server since 2011. Their server and support people are so far so good in supporting our account. I would highly recommend if someone would like to get better web hosting experience with less problem fixing requests.

Who should use semi dedicated or business hosting?

As we learnt from the service features, it's setup between shared and VPS plans. Means if you have outgrew shared environment but not ready to manage a server by yourself yet, you can choose such semi dedicated hosting because you get further upgrade with no change on management system.

Also, since it's shared by less clients with lots of extra features, it's idea choice for ecommerce applications. Especially when you need online check out from website, performance and security are extremely important for both clients and store owners. Except for the ability to handle extra traffic, semi dedicated hosting is more secure than shared hosting. Even you got account failure for any reason, urgent backup/restore can be provided to make sure you're always online in safe place.

Big or Small Web Hosting

big hosting or small hosting?When we look for a potential web hosting service, we have various channels to start with. We can do quick search from google or refer to some professional webmaster forums. However, if you have compared your search results you will find most recommendations are for those big groups who have been in business for years. Very few reference to small providers. So here the question is, will big hosting companies provide us better service than small ones?

Well, to answer the question, we must understand what kind of service we needed. It's hard to tell directly which is better choice. But we can compare in following sides.

Reliability

The primary and most essential consideration for web hosting service. You don't want to deal with server down multiple times per day. A big hosting company always has its own data center and all hosting facilities. They get side by side control over their service and be able to respond urgently in case problem occurs. Also, because a big group is serving large amount clients in various industry, hosting group must prepare a powerful server system and leading monitoring solutions to make sure their service is always up. For example, they might configure RAID disk storage, load balancing and even cloud environment for max availability.

But we can't get too much information from a small hosting. Because they're either too new or very limited clients being served by their service. We have to try out by ourselves to answer all questions. Because of this, it's more safe to start with a big service provider if you're completely new in hosting industry.

Security

The comparison could vary based the points we focus on. As about server end security, we have enough reasons to believe in a big provider because they have full access to physical server and data center space. However, problem happens on people. For example the previous hostgator employee hacked into hostgator servers after left the group and caused terrible security issue. Because there're always lots of workers in such groups their group leaders might not train every staff so well. So basically, we might get better server protection from big hosting company but we're also in risk of internal hacking!

Similar issues also apply to small providers. But we believe a small group wants to grow up and they have tried everything they could to protect your account data. Actually, because there're less people in the group, maybe two or three people there, internal hacking issues never reported yet.

Scalability

Small group should serve you better. Everything is configured as it is from those big services. They provide every customer the same service to ensure server performance and security and they don't want to make custom configuration based client requests. A single modification might cause incompatibility with their maintenance plan. Their huge system is always automated by scripts or softwares like daily updates/backup etc.

Things are little different from small server providers. Because they don't have that many clients yet, they can easily configure maintenance plans and do customization for different clients. For example if you need a server end installation or global configuration, they can evaluate quickly then satisify your as more as they can. It's extremely helpful when you're web developer and program different websites to people. You always need some customization on server end to support your projects. You might find how hard it is to make a change from big hosting service but how friendly from a small provider.

Support

A big group provides multiple support channels for 24*7. However, with our editorial experience, most support beyond regular business hours are sales support. Tech support is not always, you have to wait hours to get a response. Also, more and more big groups outsource their support to third party providers which might lead to potential security issues.

On the other side, those small hosting brands are always created by webmasters and they know how bad it is when people can not browse their website. They might could not guarantee 24 hours live support but they'll respond to you as long as they're not asleep. They monitor and fix problems carefully to satisfy everyone as much as they could. Because they want to get more business so they deal with each problem seriously and never outsource to another provider.

As we see, both big and small hosting groups have their own spotlights. You must evaluate your requirements carefully before you make a quick decision. Generally, a small provider is more developer friendly since they can adjust server settings according to requirements. But a big group may bring more trusts because they're serving a large amount clients.