Category Archives:
Blog

We always wish to see our websites is online 24*7 because we don't want to loose a single business opportunity there. Our hosting providers always give us 99.99% uptime guarantee. We do not know the exact their server uptime stats unless we can host a website on hosting server and learn it by ourselves. How can we know when our website goes down? We gathered the best 5 website monitoring tools from top user choice.

Pingdom

The most well known website monitoring service that's trusted by over 350000 users. Pingdom monitors your website from over 50 locations in the world with frequent access. It will not just tell if your site is up or down but also provides us the response time and all graphs you concerned. In case your site not accessible during a specific time, pingdom will help identify the root cause so you can prevent any recurrence. You can choose daily, weekly or monthly reports based your preference. Pingdom is fully mobile compatible so you can access the service anywhere in the world with internet connection.

• Website: https://www.pingdom.com/pricing/
• Price: $6.96/mo for single user monitoring site. 30 days risk free trial provided.

Netcraft

The most popular internet reporting website. It provides a service whereby hosting service providers can have access to detailed information on the present performance of their prospects' sites, including timely notification of outages and the facility to compare and rank performance of the monitored sites. Unlike any other website monitoring service, the netcraft service is mainly targeted to data center and hosting providers. It's more than website monitoring but applicable for all web services.

• Website: http://www.netcraft.com/monitoring-services/hosting-prospect-monitoring-uptime-alerts/
• Price: $200 per url per annum. can reach their support at sales@netcraft.com for discussion.

Uptrends

Uptrends is a leading provider of website, transactions and server monitoring services with more than 1,500 customers in 23 countries. Uptrends has monitoring checkpoints in major cities across North America, Europe, South America, Middle East, Africa, Australia and Asia. Spotlights of the service is users can receive instant SMS, email, RSS or IM alerts of site outages and their people guarantee each message accuracy.

• Website: http://www.uptrends.com/
• Price: $22.62/mo and up to 4 weeks free trial service for both professional and enterprise plans.

CopperEgg

A popular website monitoring service which is powering amazon site. Copperegg announces 15 seconds test frequency to provide the best and most accurate monitoring stats. Copperegg is also the first monitoring service with cloud support. CopperEgg cloud monitoring provides Amazon EC2 server monitoring, Rackspace server monitoring, Azure server monitoring, HP cloud monitoring, Linode server monitoring, plus support for any public and private cloud environment.

• Website: http://copperegg.com/pricing/
• Price: Free plan available for single server and 2 websites monitoring. Paid plan starts with $90/mo. 14-day free trial available.

Monitor.US

Monitor.Us is an entry-level free monitoring service designed to meet the performance needs of small businesses. Monitor.Us provides total visibility of your entire application performance universe from one dashboard. Monitor.Us highlight itself as all-in-one IT systems monitoring. It aims to provide the best monitoring solution for IT Consultants, ISPs, ISVs, Web Developers and Web Designers

• Website: https://www.monitor.us/
• Price: Free

Outsourcing is quite populary in IT industry based the huge requirements. You can outsource most stuff to thrid party company and only remain the core part to be handled by your own for highest efficiency. The same to web hosting, in order to save budget and simplify the management, more and more hosting providers try to outsource their support to another company. Can we trust such hosting service? What would be the pros and cons by doing so?

For a recent survey for IT industry, the outsource service increased 80% in the last year and has kept fast growth rate. When referring to outsourcing, the service can vary a lot based the exact products you're selling. For web hosting, mostly it's about helpdesk outsourcing. Following is a list of pros and cons of the service by comparing to traditional solutions.

Pros of outsourcing

The biggest advantage to hosting company is they can concentrate on products promotion without worring the rest support because everything will be handled by another company. Fully advantages can be detailed in follow categories.

• Time saving. Compring to old times when company staffs have to work around the clock, now they just need to clock in during regular business time and they can focus on something in terminal end without answering customer calls. You can finish work by half time under comfortable environment.
• More professional. There're lots of third party support groups who have lots of IT genius in various fields. With a properly formed support system, each customer request can be assigned to the proper support technician for fast solutions. On the other hand, if you manage everything by yourself, you may not do it so efficiently because you may encounter some problems never met before.
• Less costs. Why you have to operate 24*7? Because you have lots of work to do like server monitoring, staff training, answering customer calls and every single job in your daily tasks. It's big investment for hosting business but obviously you can reduce the cost by outsourcing some works. There's big competition among support groups so you can pick up a best provider by good price.

As we see, outsourcing could bring lots of benefits to your hosting business. Especially when you're running a big hosting company, it will simply make your business more professional and efficient.

Cons of outsourcing

Outsourcing to third party group means you have to allow their access to your system, either web based or physical server system, they must get sufficient permission in order to complete the task. You have to consider the following if you need to outsource your service.

• Security Protection. The biggest concern to ensure your business health. Once the third party company staff logged into your system, you must have good policy to monitor their actions. Any change in server end and customer accounts must be approved on your end first or else you're in high risk to be hacked in near future. You must configure strong protection and backup system for urgent recovery.
• Privacy Protection. All your clients' privacy will be exposed to third party support, means they can save all your customer information to local and you have no way to know of. As long as your clients privacy being abused somewhere you're in big trouble and probably be sued by law.

Because of above high risk points, you must find a reputable and reliable support company to work with. Such company will sign legal paper with you in various sides to protect your business in safe place. They also have good plans for staff training and security protection. You have to research a bit for those service just like the same way you evaluate a hosting plan because you're going to put your business there.

Many hosting companies are outsourcing nowadays. endurance – one of the biggest hosting group on the planet is also doing outsourcing for multiple brands. They keep acquiring available business but obviously they can't purchase over all support staffs. Instead, they outsource a lot because of their own limited support people. It's not bad choice as long as they can balance the above points.

No one wants to work with a bad rated hosting service and no hosting company would like to build a bad reputation from the industry. However, many providers are indeed doing something to ruin their business in long run. Here we have generated a list of actions on how have a hosting company built a bad reputation.

More than capability features

Most servers are setup on single server basis with very limited hardware resource but everybody loves unlimited features from hosting plans like disk space, databases and email accounts and every features in hosting account. For most people they only need small resources to power a website, however there's always some exceptions you can not avoid. In case a customer used more than allocation, don't expect them to pay for extra. Instead, they will write bad comments to your company anywhere on the web so you'll loose lots of potential clients.

Outdated equipments

Web hosting business is actually full of competition based the amount of providers. In order to get customer orders, many providers are trying to reduce the costs. But they have to be profitable for their low price plans. So they purchase cheap outdated server equipments. The direct result is people will get slowness on website connection and as the number of customer accounts grow up, it will be super unstable. You might have stated what your service is most suitable for but no people will notice that, they just want to get what advertised on your site.

Oversea servers

Many hosting companies do not have their own hardware equipments. Especially from the start up, they just rent server space from data center or reseller providers. In order to save investment as more, cheap and oversea server service is their primary consideration. With such service, you just get remote access to server but do not know how the server is prepared under what condition. Because you have selected the cheap server to work with, you will not purchase premium support where you can call in 24×7. Unless you're 100% confident about server management, you'll be screamed heavily once you lost connection to server. Not to mention 99% uptime which is advertised on your site, the in time customer support can not be guaranteed.

Outsourced support

It's popular choice by many hosting companies to outsource their customer support to third party provider. They either do not have that much man power to be available 24×7 or simply don't pay enough attention to it. The problem is the third party support may not so familiar with your service structure, they can not provide some necessary technical answers thus you're in risk of loosing customers by doing that.

Another risk is you have to provide necessary admin rights to third party support people. In this way they will get access to your admin side and do some changes to customer accounts. You're not sure how those people being trained to handle such business because you never met them before. Giving them access to your customers' property means to put your business in risk.

If you have been doing above, don't complain people are posting negative comments to your service because all is the result by what you have done. Your customer just write honestly from their experience and they're the actual victim.

It's a hard job to maintain a good reputation. Nobody would like to ruin their own business but sometimes they're doing so and they may not even notice it. That's where problem starts. If you would like to maintain good reputation of your hosting business, review every day and think from customer side. Just think what service you need and what kind support you want to get from hosting company. In this way you will prevent most problems and customer will just thumb up with your service.

All of us understand unlimit stuff does not exist. It's nothing but just a popular marketing term. We have revealed the real space size limitation on web server before, but what would be the limits for database space? How much you need exactly and how to keep your database in healthy state? This article will provide answers to all these questions plus guidance on how to keep a small and high performance database.

Besides the enterprise database solution "Oracle", there're two types most popular database engines – Mysql and Ms sql server. Both databse services are powering over 80% world wide web applications for secure, high performance and affordable costs. Whenever you need to use either service, you can easily have it ready from local computer or live hosting server. You might get a good plan to promote your website to a large community forum or shopping cart platform. For this, you will need a lot of server space to store web files and database. You can probably calculate out the approx space for website files but no idea about database space. How much should you prepare for it? Let's look below

Size of database space will completely depend how you design your website structure. Most of the time we just store user data and product information to database, however sometimes you have the need to keep all uploadings to database instead web server disk. For this case, your database size will go up rapidly so you might need GBs or even TBs depends your site popularity. Since more and more use existing cms softwares for website building like joomla, wordpress or dotnetnuke etc, we can easily calculate how much database space we might utilize. Most CMS softwares have pre-optimized for website and database structures so people can create a high performance website easily without dealing with lots of technical stuff. But that doesn't mean you can feel 100% safe. Some problems are with the service itself but not on software end.

Take wordpress for example, if you have developed a site on local computer with multiple revise, you might have noticed the database is already very big, sometimes even hundreds MBs. But it's defiitely not right, how did you upload so much data to the site? For wordpress, it will keep an article revision every time you make any update to it, means you kept multiple duplicated contents in database. We highly suggest use WP-Optimize to clear out all those revisions if you don't need anymore. You will see magic size decrease after optimization.

Another problem with wordpress is about "Akismet" anti spam plugin which is installed by default. Once you have configured this plugin, it will catch all spam attacks to a table called "wp_commentmeta" and table size will go up once there's a new spam. Even if you have deleted the spam comments from admin panel, the table size won't change at all. We hight recommend to follow our previous akismet problem article for quick fix. Clean out gabbage in your database will save great space.

For mysql databases, it's recommended by developer to optimize tables regularly. It will not only optimize the performance but will also save space. You can do it easily from phpmyadmin, just select all your tables then choose "optimize" from dropdown option, the process is 100% automatic.

How about Ms sql server? Unlike mysql, the size problem occurs on transaction log. You might have small data in database but generate a big backup file. Why is that? It's because sql server database will record down each transaction to log files. Transaction log records each request to the database including queries from website and even system failure logs. Those logs are essential when you like to track an event on your website but will result in big size.

In case you have very limited space alloation on server end, your database will stop functional. Database log on server end is kept as "dbname.ldf" this format. If log file is important to your website, it's suggested make a backup and download to your local computer. Once backed up you should truncate the log to release more free space.

Command to backup transaction log:
BACKUP LOG yourdatabase
   TO logname_log;
GO

Command to shrink sql server database:
ALTER DATABASE mydatabase SET RECOVERY SIMPLE
 DBCC SHRINKFILE (mydatabase_Log, 1)

You might don't have the permission to do this directly since it requires admin rights on server end, you can contact hosting support for assistance.

Don't imagine you really need big space for database, optimize it properly then you can maintain it more professionally. Take a look below for world wide database size research.

If you have asked for web hosting suggestion or server configuration for your php web application, most professionals and online resource will redirect you to linux support. Why is that? What if you use windows computer for development? Is it bad to install PHP on windows server? This article will give an indepth review to check if linux is that good for php scripting.

PHP introduction

PHP(www.php.net) is an open source scripting language that's popularly used by thousands of applications all over the world. It's improved by world wide developers and released regularly by PHP official community. It's currently provided via 3 packages: Source codes, Binary files and auto installer. Unlike other programming technologies like ASP or asp.net that ultilize other script languages such as VB or C#, PHP is a script language for itself.

Since from the very beginning, php has been provided for both linux and windows editions. You get multiple choice to have php installed based your preferring. PHP is actually installed by most windows hosting providers and has been working great as from linux platform. Moreover, the latest windows server provides dedicated support for PHP with user friendly GUI tools. Generally, PHP comes with following advantages on windows IIS server

Easy Installation. PHP can be installed in multiple solutions: exe installer, binary zip package, you can also re-compile the source codes to customize the installation based your development experience. Since from IIS7.0, IIS team provided a great module called "PHP Manager", with this module you can get php running by the best practice. PHP manager is dedicated for php and provides following great features

• Register PHP with IIS
• Validate and properly configure existing PHP installations
• Run multiple PHP versions side by side
• Check PHP runtime configuration and environment

Easy management. PHP installation on windows server will put all files under a specific directory. If you want to add a new module that's not included in the package, you can get from official site directly then place it under extension directory to have it enabled. In case you run into any problem with your php application, you can debug directly from php manager center because error logs will be produced there for quick fix.

High performance. Since from IIS 7.0, PHP can be configured via Fast-CGI mode where php scripts will be executed fastly by less system resource. You can also speed up the response via various modules like accelerator or zend guard etc. PHP optimization on windows server is pretty easy.

Why there's complaint for IIS PHP?

There're lots of complaint for php not performing well or compatibility etc. However, that's all from old windows platforms that have been dropped by most hosting providers. Some old windows system like server 2003 does not have too much options to work with like the new server products. Once PHP installed, it will be functional as it is. However, you have full control over every php functions on new IIS7.0 and 8.0. Via php manager and other modules you can test and monitor php performance lively without affecting other applications on same server. You can apply different php settings to each site for different requirements.

Cost is another main factor, while you can get linux 100% for free, you need to pay license fee for windows server. There're always one or two bucks more for hosting service on windows server. Actually, price should be the main reason why people not recommending windows for php hosting purpose. No one wants to pay more just because the provider spend more for server setup.

When should you consider PHP on windows server?

As suggested from above, performance is no longer a concern for new windows server system. However, you can't always avoid using windows for your projects. For example you might need to test different applications at the same time, but if you selected linux, you can not host .net script under a linux server. For this situation, windows would be your right choice. You can host both PHP and .net applications by easy configuration.

So basically, if you just want to save money for pure PHP scripts, linux is absolutely perfect choice since less investment required for hosting server. But if you need to use php as well as microsoft technologies, windows is the right choice, you don't have to sign up different hosting plans separately because windows will be fully compatible!

If you're looking for a budget and high performance windows server plan, we highly recommend arvixe(www.arvixe.com) based editorial experience. Arvixe provides windows server 2012 with remote iis manager support, php is just a simple support. Price starts at $5/mo and 30% discount available if you subscribe 2 years upfront via coupon "Clue30". You can't get better offer from other place.

In web hosting industry, there's a special service that requires HIPAA compliance. What's it? How can a hosting service meet up with HIPAA compliance? This article will explain side by side and help find the best HIPAA compliant hosting plan.

What's HIPAA?

It's abbreviation of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, it sets law protection and use of Personal (or Protected) Health Information (PHI). This includes covered entities (CE) and anyone with access to patient information must be in compliance.

What's HIPAA Compliant Hosting?

There's some recent changes in HIPAA that require Covered Entities and all of their Business Associates who create, receive, maintain transmit or have access to protected health information (or the possibility exists that the protected health information in the business associate's custody or control could be compromised) to independently comply with HIPAA. If you store or transmit electronic protected health information via a hosting service, the hosting company must be HIPAA Compliant.

However, it's not easy to be HIPAA compliant because of required technologies and safeguards protection over physical equipments. Generally, a hosting company must have the following facilities provided

Physical safeguards. This include limited facility access and control, with authorized access in place. Basically it's requirement to hosting data center space where is final location of all datas. Hosting companies either need to rent server space from HIPAA compliant ISP or simply setup their own data centers by following HIPAA compliance.

Technical safeguards. A server layer protection with access control to allow only the authorized to access electronic protected health data. This includes both server data protection as well as monitoring system to ensure the highest safety.

Log reports. Audit reports & logs must be implemented to keep records of activity on hardware and software. This will tell how's your data being accessed, used and edited so you can track the violations source if problem occurs.

Secure backup policies. All sensitive data should be securely backed up with quick recovery. The policy must ensure all PHI data can be recovered accurately and intact. Backup should be idealy placed offsite where can't be accessed publicly.

Data transmission protection. The last technical safeguard over PHI. This concerns all methods of transmitting data, whether it be email, Internet, or even over a private network such as a private cloud. Hosting company must provide necessary technologies such as SSL and other data encryption solutions.

HIPAA Compliant Hosting Plan

Who can provide quality HIPAA compliant hosting plan? As from above explanation and HIPAA requirements, a decent HIPAA compliant hosting provider must have their own HIPAA compliant data center space with leading safe protection. Because security is the highest requirement, hosting company must have the following features provided:

• Private Firewall services with VPN for remote access
• Managed private Cloud Server
• Separate database and web servers
• Offsite Backup at a minimum, IT Disaster Recovery is better
• SSL certificates and HTTPS for all web-based access to PHI
• Setup private IP addresses

There're not too many hosting providers announced to be HIPAA compliant, www.onlinetech.com is one of the very few hosts who provides detailed explanation for their HIPAA hosting service. Onlinetech provides multiple HIPAA hosting plans via Cloud, Managed Servers and Colocation solutions.

Resource of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.