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What type disk raid is best for hosting server? I recently got such question from one client because he cares about server performance a lot. Different hosting providers advertise different server configurations. Some tells the exact server structures and some just blow off by vague words. In this article let's check out the most popular server disk setup then find which type is best to power a business site.

RAID Introduction

Short of redundant array of independent disks, is a type of server disk setup solution to increase single volum storage size and improve performance. The most popular name SAN is completely created from RAID disk. Generally, there're Raid 0~10 and Raid 50 available. For hosting servers it's normally setup on Raid 5 or Raid 10. Some hosting providers also offer Raid 50. We'll compare Raid0, Raid 1, Raid5 and Raid 10 that have been used by hosting servers.

RAID 0. Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance

The most basic and simple RAID setup that only requires two hard drives. RAID 0 implements a striped disk array, the data is broken down into blocks and each block is written to a separate disk drive. The most advantage of RAID 0 is I/O performance is greatly improved by spreading the I/O load across many channels and drives.

Disadvantages: Because its not fault-tolerant, the failure of just one drive will result in all data loss in RAID 0 array. For servers that require high performance as well as high availability, RAID 0 should never be used.

RAID 1. Mirroring and Duplexing

More advanced setup than RAID 0. Besides all advantages from RAID 0, RAID 1 is 100% redundancy setup to make sure all data safety. In case of a disk failure, it will make a copy to the replacement disk for fast recovery. From production testing, RAID 1 read speed is twice of single disk so performance is greatly improved.

The big disadvantage of RAID 1 is the cost. Because it will copy data from one drive to another thus the overal storage is not increased at all. Also, RAID 1 is mainly done by system softwares thus it adds more loading of server CPU/RAM etc and the server overall performance is affected.

RAID 5: Independent Data disks with distributed parity blocks

An advanced and one of the most popular RAID solution. It's widely used for high performance and data redundancy. This RAID level provides the highest read data transaction rate and low ratio of ECC (Parity) disks to data disks. RAID 5 transfer rate and efficiency is the best comparing to any previous RAID solution.

Although there're lots of unbeatable advantages for RAID 5 system, it has the most complex controller design which makes it difficult to rebuild in the event of a disk failure (as compared toRAID level 1). Individual block data transfer rate is the same as single disk.

RAID 10. Stripe of Mirrors/Mirror of Stripes

A RAID subsystem that increases safety by writing the same data on two drives (mirroring), while increasing speed by interleaving data across two or more mirrored "virtual" drives (striping). RAID 10 provides the most security and speed but uses more drives. RAID 10 can be understood in two ways: RAID 1+0 and RAID 0+1. That means the setup is combination of Raid 0 and Raid 1. That's how max speed and security produced.

There's another RAID solution gaining more popularity called RAID 50(Combination of Raid 5 and Raid 0). There's hot discussion about which is better. Actually, both are good solutions but you must evaluate carefully about what kind of files you store on server. There's a good article about RAID 10 and RAID 50 comparison. The following chart clearly shows the main difference.

As we see, RAID 10 provides better security and performance with regarding to web hosting service. The only negative in using RAID 10 is only 50% drives capacity is usable due to mirroring. But there's no such limitation from RAID 50.

Conclusion

RAID 10 is better choice if we're looking for high performance hosting service. It's also configured by most leading server hosting providers like Inmotion and Arvixe. It's highly suggested brands for business hosting purpose. Their standard management system and high performance service simply made half your business success!

Go to arvixe official and check server details http://www.arvixe.com

Google is recognized the career heaven by most IT workers. The company is also frequently ranked top 3 best employers in the world. But how do the google workers comment about the company? There's a hot topic from Quora that followed by lots of google employees. They revealed some of the worst things working at google. We have quoted from Quora comments and check what makes up the worst thing working from google.

NO.1 Everyone is awesome, so they can hire the very best people to do even the most mundane jobs

The worst part of working at Google, for many people, is that they're overqualified for their job. Google has a very high hiring bar due to the strength of the brand name, the pay & perks, and the very positive work culture. As a result, they have their pick of bright candidates, even for the most low-level roles.

There are students from top 10 colleges who are providing tech support for Google's ads products, or manually taking down flagged content from YouTube, or writing basic code to A|B test the color of a button on a site.

NO.2 Google is not a startup any more. It's a big, big corporation

Google was not a start-up environment by the time I left. The same office politics. It was easy to get promoted if you worked on the right projects and projected your work in the right way.

NO.3 Many of the engineers are arrogant

Unfortunately, in spite of the common belief, I think the average level of Google engineers is mediocre. With a lot of arrogance, too. Everybody believes he (males dominate) is better than his neighbor. So it is really hard to discuss any issue unless it is your friend you are talking to. Objective discussions are pretty rare, since everybody's territorial, and not interested in opinions of other people unless those people are Important Gods.

NO.4 Google is so big you can't have any impact on it

I worked at Google for 3 years and it was very difficult to leave but there was one major factor that helped me make the decision – the impact I could ever have on the business as an individual was minimal. As noted in many answers below, Google is an incredible machine that prints money thanks to AdWords. Unless you are an amazingly talented engineer who gets to create something new, chances are you're simply a guy/girl with an oil can greasing the cogs of that machine.

NO.5 Middle management is mediocre

They don't want to rock the boat, they don't know how to inspire their workforce, and they rely far too much on the Google name and reputation to do that for them.

NO.6 Google may understand engineering, but not design

There is not enough focus on product and visual design.  This has led to many aborted/semi-successful products, like Wave, Google Video, Buzz, Dodgeball, Orkut, Knol, and Friend Connect.  There is probably too much focus on pure engineering.

NO.7 Your office space can be too small

If you have to work in one of the four main campus buildings, you will most likely be extremely cramped. It's not uncommon to see 3-4 employees in a single cube, or several managers sharing an office. With all the open areas for food, games, TV, tech talks, etc, it can be surprisingly hard to find a quiet, private place to think.

NO.8 Get things in writing

If you are in the process of gaining employment with Google, negotiate hard, be demanding, and make sure to get EVERYTHING in writing. Google makes lots of vague promises, and seems to not deliver.

NO.9 Googlers can get caught up in trivia

In Zurich there is a quiet room where people go to relax, or take a nap. There are very nice looking fish tanks there and you can waste as much of your work time there, watching the fish do fishy things. There was a 100+ emails thread about removing the massage chairs from that room because some people allegedly were being kept from sleeping because the massage chairs were too noisy.

NO.10 The culture is immature

It's like never-never land – people never grow up.  They drink at all hours, socialize constantly, play games, and do little to no work.

NO.11 You can't work remotely

But the killer to me was the inability to work remotely, which I have been doing successfully for the past 5-6 years.

NO.12 Googlers treat temps with disrespect

As someone who has worked for a temp job working for Google, the worst part is the smug attitude of those who work for the REAL Google. They seem to think that anyone who isn't working for the actual Google like they are is somehow mentally and morally inferior.

Original posted on http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-confess-the-worst-things-about-working-at-google-2013-11

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.

Green is heavily advertised by lots of hosting providers to show their care about environment. We also introduced multiple leading green hosting providers from old articles. However, what really makes up a green hosting service? How people think about exactly? In this article, our editors have done in depth research of the service and will guide you to learn about the secrets side by side.

About Green Hosting

When we refer to green hosting or eco friendly hosting, mostly we're talking about the clean power supply. Means the hosting providers either setup their own green data center space or purchase green engergy from certified provider. Because the IT industry is consuming lots of electricity, the purpose is to reduce carbon emission by clean power resource. The following power supply technologies are popularly used:

• Solar. An endless power source and 100% clean. It's widely used from industrial and home applications. The problem of solar panel is the big investment and less efficiency guarantee. When it's getting dirty without in time cleaning up, the efficiency can lose up to 50%.
• Nuclear. The most powerful and efficient solution. We just need to feed very few nuclear fuel then it will produce out huge energies. It requires high technology and big investment to setup/maintain. Also, because of the disaster in Japan, many countries announced not to build new plants in near future.
• Wind. The most economic solution with easy installation. Logically it can be installed almost everywhere with less cost. The problem is it's not always consistant and only applicable from specific areas.
• Tidal. Consistant and powerful energy source, but is much harder to build the plant. It's also not so easy to find a perfect place to configure the power supply plant. It's reliable energy source but just hard to get it.
• Geothermal. Also a constant energy source, but it's not available everywhere. The most popular place with this energy support is ice land where over 70% power supply is geothermal based. This solution requires high technology and massive up front costs.

For green hosting industry, all service providers highlight themselves for wind solutions. Why? Not because it's the best but just for it's low cost and easy to get. Based the green hosting requirements, as long as your power supply is not carbon related such as coal and gas then it's green. Actually, in United States, the wind power supply is not the primary choice. Because of the huge consumption, nuclear, wind, gas and lots of other traditional solutions all receive big market share.

How does customer think about green hosting?

To be honest, site owners care more about connectivity and availability. Whatever power the server is supported, it's not something users care about because that's business of their hosting providers. When a hosting service highlights itself for green power supply, no much people would like to pay extra dollars per month just because they want to proud of green.

Why there's extra fee included for green hosting? Well, for a decent green hosting provider, they got lots of stuff to work with besides green power supply, it includes optimized data center and server structures for less power consumption, it also refers to how they can recycle the used energy and other tactics to give zero negative effect to environment or even makes it better. Those efforts like planting new trees and advanced server cooling technologies all need man power and money. The direct result is the service cost increased.

Take the most popular hosting provider greengeeks for example, they indeed apply lots of useful efforts to follow their plans. They even build up energy saving office and bring home cooked foods to company to reduce less pollusion to the earth. But you have to subscribe 3 years upfront in order to take the $4.95/mo promotional price. if we sign up yearly, price is $7.95/mo and $14.95 for monthly deal. As we see, the price is almost twice of many other hosting plans. Other greengeeks hosting solutions like vps and dedicated servers are also relatively expensive comparing to their competitors.

For short, to be green or not is just an attitude. For hosting business, you can try whatever efforts to get customer, but you have to work harder to keep them because performance is really what everybody concerns.

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.

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.