SAN Hosting Introduction

What's SAN? Storage area network (SAN) is a dedicated storage network which provides access to consolidated, block level storage. Comparing to single server hard drive setup, SAN provides a dedicated storage service for multiple servers in the network for fast data transmission. SAN storage is flexible for future growth and problem fixing and ensures the max data security. SAN also let the maintenance easier for its simple structure, server system failure is also greatly reduced.

Normally, a production hosting server is always configured by both SAN and RAID, but it's not the case for some small hosting companies. The SAN hosting providers should have full access to datacenter network and all server products, this means a lot of monetary investments. So if you're looking for a real and reliable SAN hosting provider, just select from the Top hosting list and mostly you'll be satisfied with the services.

Best SAN Web Hosting

Arvixe.com is awarded the best san web hosting for shared server plans. Arvixe hosting servers are all SAN/NAS enabled for top data security. If you're looking for reliable and fast SAN hosting provider, looks nowhere else than arvixe. Based the latest hardware production via RAID 10, arvixe is delivering leading web hosting sevice to every clients. Arvixe SAN is configured as

• Multiple Server Access to Shared Storage
• Dual Power & Redundant Connectivity
• Scalable without Service Interruption
• More than 100TB per contiguous

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Based enterprise class hardware setup, the Arvixe fully managed Storage Area Network (SAN) is a highly scalable and fault-tolerant central network storage cluster for your critical data. SAN connects directly to web servers using extremely fast, low latency Gigabit Ethernet connections. This allows customers to transfer data sequentially, or parallel, without affecting the performance of the host server. Arvixe provides multiple redundant enterprise class disk arrays as well as an option for Managed File Replication for maximum protection and reliability of your critical data.

SAN and RAID and NAS

When we talk about SAN, RAID is always put into the topic. Redundant Array of Independent Disks(RAID) is a technology that provides increased storage functions and reliability through redundancy. This is achieved by combining multiple disk drive components into a logical unit, where data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways called "RAID levels", the best is RAID 50 for production use server systems. When you're searching for SAN based hosting provider you should check with pre-sales and clear about the specifications.

Network-attached storage(NAS) is the technology used to attach the remote SAN disk to your local server through network.

BuySAFE Introduction

What's buysafe? buySAFE is free for online merchants to use with their free automatic installation of OS Commerce. buySAFE will provide you with an explicit third-party endorsement of merchant reliability and trustworthiness, backed by a bond guarantee. Buysafe has merchant and buyer programs for seller and buyer. The aim of the program is to make business safe under good guarantees.

Best BuySAFE Web Hosting

For fast, secure and reliable Buy Safe Hosting, look no further than Arvixe for all your web hosting related needs. Arvixe hosting plan provides everything you need, including a free automated installation of Buy Safe , to get you up and running within minutes:

• Unlimited Space / Unlimited Data Transfer
• Host up to 6 Domains
• One FREE domain registration for life
• 24/7 world-class qualified and experienced support
• cPanel Control Panel – Unlimited email, databases and subdomains.
• 99.9% uptime and 60 day money back guarantee!
• Fully adheres to all Buy Safe hosting system requirements

More details about Arvixe hosting on this arvixe reviews

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More about Buysafe

buySAFE has been proven to increase buyer confidence by providing Certified Merchants with the buySAFE Seal for display on their website and by enabling shoppers to guarantee their purchase with a bond.

buySAFE offers a unique solution to one of the biggest challenges that online shoppers face knowing who to trust. A buySAFE Seal on a merchant's Website or marketplace item listing indicates that the merchant has:

* passed the rigorous buySAFE Certification Process to ensure they are trustworthy and reliable;
* agreed to allow buySAFE to continuously monitor their performance in every transaction; and
* qualified to guarantee their transactions with a bond from buySAFE and its surety partners Liberty Mutual, Travelers, and ACE USA.

Buysafe official site: http://www.buysafe.com/

Buysafe vs Opencart vs oscommerce

All the three are good choice for shopping cart installation. But which is better choice? According to their explanation and features, buysafe is more about a security program other than cart software, it mainly focus on business users with up to $25,000 issurance and it's not free to get the software. You have to meet various requirements in order to get it running properly on your server. It's not a recommended choice for starter user.

Oscommerce is one of the oldest ecommerce solution that's recognized powerful and safe for business. There's a huge community for oscommerce support and there's lots of plugins/templates to customize your store site. oscommerce is also the very first free shopping cart software with open source scripts. You can fully customize it by editing codes behind.

Unlike both above, opencart is well known for it's simple navigation and clean layouts. It's available in multiple languages with lots of modules/plugins to setup a powerful shopping site. It's used widely by people in everywhere of the world because it supports multi-currency with exchange. It's working perfect by integrating with your local payment gateways. No matter if you just want to sell products/service to your local users or international people, opencart will be best choice.

As above comparison, we highly recommend opencart for ecommerce site creation. Oscommerce is just too complex for new users and buysafe is not affordable solution.

Virtual server Introduction

Virtual server or virtual machine is a kind of virtualization technologies used to devide a dedicated server into several virtual parts and each virtual server can have it's own OS and server space and everything to perform like an independent server system.

Virtual server is the future of the IT industry and already popularly used by thousands of service providers. In this article I'll introduce several main virtual server softwares and their service provider.

VMware – Vmware has the longest history in virtual server industry and is absolutely the leader. Vmware products are various from personal to business, either from workstation or professional hosting solutions, vmware has side by side technologies support. Vmware is mostly used personally for learning purpose. their desktop product "workstation" is the best choice for windows platform. Vmware has following core products for IT solution

• VMware Workstation
• VMware Infrastructure
• VMware ESX Server
• VMware VirtualCenter
• VMware P2V Assistant

Virtuozzo – Virtuozzo is definitely the best virtualization software on windows server. 99% windows VPS providers are actually using it. Virtuozzo is produced by parallels company which is also offerring plesk hosting control panel. The best feature of virtuozzo is the powerful backup and less consumption of the host server resources. Since it's a virtualization of the host OS, the performance is the best among many other virtual server solutions.

Xen – An open sourced virtual server technology developed by Cambridge university. It's working under Linux environments and it's being attached to all linux distributions. With XEN, your host machine don't have to be very strong in order to running a virtual server. you can even deploy it under some pretty old equipments computer and the performance is still good.

Openvz – Openvz is another product from Parallels company, it's open sourced and widely used by many VPS hosting providers for it's high performance. you can even edit the kernel to customize the virtual server.

Virtuozzo vs Xen vs Openvz

If you're searching for a windows VPS server, virtuozzo is absolutely the primary choice since it has the highest performance on windows server. Here I'll mainly compare Xen and Openvz, because more and more people are trying linux VPS for the cheap price. When you search the web, there're many cheap linux vps plans. Here're some comparision between the linux vps technologies and help you find the correct vps provider.

Generally speaking, Xen and Openvz both have excellent performance from their source design. The difference is mainly reply on how does the hosting provider address their service.

For a Xen based virtual server, if you get 512MB memory then it is the actual ammount allocated from the host server. But for Openvz based virtual machine, all virtual machines are sharing the same memory! So if there's only few virtual servers on the host server, there's no performance difference, but almost all hosting providers are trying to max their profit and always deploy 3 times or more virtual servers on the same host server!

Now there's big difference between Xen and Openvz, the Xen based virtual server will encounter slowness but the Openvz based server will be shut down directly! So if you wish stability on a VPS, Xen based system is recommended. when there's no much virtual servers on host server, openvz based system has better performance but the situation almost doesn't exist.

• Virtuozzo VPS provider – www.Arvixe.com
• Xen VPS provider – please check on this vps hosting page.
• Openvz VPS provider – www.HostGator.com

Ftp Introduction

FTP is a file transfer protocol which is used to upload or download files from one server to another on internet. File transfer through ftp can be done via ftp client such as filezilla or via windows explorer directly. Till present, ftp is still the most efficient method for file uploading/downloading.

FTP is not enabled on any server as default. The hosting server admin has to configure it manually through their experience. Normally Serv-U is the most popular FTP software on windows server and Pureftpd is the best under Linux environment. FTP is supported by most web hosting providers

Best FTP Web Hosting

When referring to the best ftp hosting, the hosting server must support the following ftp features

• Support both active and passive ftp connections from client.
• Support most ftp clients such as cute ftp, filezilla and flashxp etc.
• Unlimited concurrent FTP connections, this is most important when you have several people working on the same ftp space.
• Unlimited FTP user, this allows you to allocate ftp space to different users with different types of permissions.
• Secure ftp connection is supported

With all above minimum requirements and editorial experience, WebhostingHub is awarded the best ftp web hosting provider. For only $4.99/mo you get unlimited ftp accounts and unlimited disk space. Whub ftp hosting service has a bunch of outstanding hosting features includes the following

• Optimized ftp server – Unlimited ftp users and unlimited ftp connections through secure transfer layer such as sftp.
• Support team with special FTP knowledge with 24 x 7 online support
• Tutorials and guidance to popular ftp softwares
• Hosting plan comes with FREE domain registration and unlimited domain hosting
• Unlimited Email accounts, unlimited databases with 99.99% uptime guarantee!

What really makes Webhostinghub FTP outstanding is their fast and stable connection between users and hosting space. The webhostinghub hosting servers are powered by datacenters from east and west coasts with max speed zone enabled. They announced not to oversell their space for best performance and strictly follow this policy. Over the general comparison over other hosting service, the webhostinghub server speed is at least 100% faster than other competitors.

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More about FTP Web Hosting

FTP is a must when you deal with web hosting service. Choosing the right ftp web hosting will speed up your website deployment. Especially when you're operating a web design company and always upload/download data through FTP connection, speed is most essential point. When you need to give out server space to client, then can manage all stuff through FTP as well. By doing that you just need to create additional ftp user and point to the specific web directory without causing security issues.

FTP Passive mode vs Active mode

To deal with firewall, FTP has both passive mode and active mode configured on server end. Here I'll compare the two modes and help you check ftp related problems when you encounter such.

Active mode – The client connects from a random port (higher than 1023) to the FTP server's port 21. Then, the client starts listening to port N+1 and sends the FTP command PORT N+1 to the FTP server. The server will then connect back to the client's specified data port from its local data port 20.

Passive mode – The client opens two random ports locally (N > 1023 and N+1). The first port contacts the server on port 21, the server then opens a random unprivileged port (P > 1023) and sends the PORT P command back to the client. The client then initiates the connection from port N+1 to port P on the server to transfer data.

From above comparison, Passive mode ftp connection is ideal for ftp users and Active mode is ideal for server admin. Generally speaking, a professional hosting provider will open a certain ports on server end to support both active mode and passive mode ftp connections.