Review of different hosting companies & services side by side with our continous testing/monitoring over website performance, customer feed backs and overall industry reputation. We host sample website and do necessary testing on some crucial features to ensure our recommendation is perfect.

WPEngine Review, is it worth the pay?

WP engine review

So our topic turns to wordpress again in this article. We have introduced multiple popular wordpress hosting providers from older posts and received positive feedback from visitors. However, what will happen when you go over shared hosting environment and not ready to use a dedicated server yet? In this article let's check out another popular name – WPengine, a hosting service that's dedicated for wordpress support.

Unlike every other hosting company who offers various hosting solutions, the wpengine is only prepared for wordpress hosting with a professional team behind. What does that mean? Means as long as you like to use wordpress to setup your website, you can have almost every wp related problem fixed with their leading support. Common issue like wordpress plugin, theme or further wp development are all included with their support TOS.

Wp Engine Overview

WP engine was founded in July 2010 by a group of wordpress smart technicians. WP Engine is solely focused on providing WordPress hosting. You get fully and side by side support for any wordpress related issue. WP engine support center is located in Texas, USA

WP Engine Hosting Plans

WP Engine offers total of four wordPress hosting plans. They limit each hosting plans via different storage and number of monthly visits. Details can be found below

  • A single wordPress installation with up to 25,000 visits per month for personal plan.
  • 10 wordpress installations and up to 100,000 visits per month for professional plan.
  • 25 installations with up to 400,000 visits per month for business plan.

What's exactly good of WP Engine hosting?

Just like their website domain says, the engine of wordpress. Based on the rule "you get what you pay", the spotlights of wpengine are available in following terms

  • Powerful server — Because they're providing dedicated wordpress hosting support and wordpress is pretty server resource consuming, the wpengine support team configured hosting server with the fastest bare-metal hardware with leading network backbones. Once your wordpress is setup with their service, it's actually running on a cluster of servers for best performance.
  • Quality support — It would be great news for wp developers who require instant and professional wordpress technical support. The wpengine support is all of experts, either from live communication or ticket system, we will get what we expected in good manner.
  • Honest service — They don't offer us everything unlimited like most hosting companies. They just offer what we actually need, for example personal, business and premium plans all come with different features for different level service requirements. Not sure if they will satisify you? No worry, just sign up and try 15 days for FREE! They won't charge you during the 15 days period, they only charge until you'r satisified!

Check out wpengine full features from http://www.wpengine.com

wpengine advantages

What Would be WP Engine Weakness?

Price is definitely the weakness with wpengine services. The personal wordpress hosting plan comes with $29/mo and the business plan is configured for $249/mo which is almost dedicated server price. Unless people really have to go with wordpress and need that kind reliability, their service is not affordable for a regular personal website. But what to say, there're thousands of heavy traffic wordpress sites and if you have such website on more expensive dedicated server hosting, the wpengine is absolutely good to go for money saving.

So basically, who should use WP engin hosting service? If you're looking for budget and affordable wordpress hosting service, WP engine is never recommended based their price. However, if you're operating a large wordpress site that receives very heavy traffic and expect super security on the wordpress site, WP Engine is probably the best choice. If you don't mind the budget and wish the best site performance, you won't find a better solution other than WP Engine.

How do we think about WP Engine?

WPengine is pretty new comparing to many hosting services (started in 2010), but they definitely have a good start and easy to to get business success based on their honesty and profession. Only after 12 months growing up, the WP Engine is already a million dollar group with fast growth rate. Their professionality and reliability have been supporting hundreds of large wordpress platforms. If you have a heavy traffic wordpress site and don't want to deal with lots of technical stuff, wp engine is highly recommended service if you can afford the service fee.

Good & Affordable wordpress hosting choice?

Yes, if you're not ready to pay such amount yet for wordpress hosting and looking for high reliable service plan, Inmotion would be the best alternative solution. With only $5.95/mo you enjoy up to 90 days money back guarantee and quality wordpress tech support! Based on the inmotion advantages, you simply placed your wordpress site in safe place.

Check out Inmotion hosting wordpress plans http://www.inmotionhosting.com


Best Sub Domain Name Hosting

sub domain name hosting

When dealing with web hosting service, we certainly need a web address to put up our website. We can either take the advantage of top level domain registration or the free sub domain from hosting provider. However, in this article I would like to talk about the sub domain under our main domain names. Let's find out the advantages of using sub domains and how to choose the correct sub domain name hosting provider.

When do you need sub domain name?

Sub domain is popularly offered on some large scale websites. Let's say you're operating an online service and you're going to develop more functions and offer a personal website to each registered member. Creating subfolder under the main domain is definitely not a good solution since it will affect the performance as the folder numbers going up. Under such circumstance, setup sub domain name for each user would be the ideal choice.

What's the typical live example on internet? Absolutely the popular blog system such as blog.com and wordpress.com, when we register we will be able to create a personal website on a sub domain. Another good example is on web hosting. After account registration and activation we will be assigned with at least one sub domain name for testing purpose. In a word, when you're offering many services on your website, you should consider using sub domain names for better management.

More Sub Domain Advantages

I have to say, sub domain is a must feature if you're going to promote your website in long term. Following returns are expected

  • Website SEO — With no doubt, the most successful websites are all big size with lots of internal/external links plus a great amount web contents. Offerring sub domain name to people simply means to add more content to your website. It's all fresh when search engine bots crawling around. What's the result? our website will be more friendly to SE and rank high! The more developed, the more benefit in return.
  • Brand promotion — Sub domain name is perfect way for brand promotion. For example, there're several sub domain names with quality contents and rank high. Which name will be advertised more? Absolutely our top level domain. The more construction on sub domain names the more promotion will be on our actual domain brand!

Based above advantages, we're very close to business success. But please keep in mind we should not abuse the advantages or else it will be disaster to our entire website. Just handle it correctly and enjoy the big success in return!

Best Sub Domain Name Hosting?

Sub domain name is supported by every hosting provider, but it doesn't mean all hosting plans will work properly with us. For example if we just want to use an existing sub domain and host the top level domain somewhere else, then a regular shared hosting plan should work well. However, like the cases we discussed above, a less quality hosting will never be suitable. Many hosting providers announce to offer unlimited sub domain support but the never explained how it's offered. For big size website system, the shared server resource won't be enough to store all data and traffic.

So make sure we understand our needs and the hosting plan features clearly. Also please keep in mind everything has a limitation. For those who announce to offer unlimited service, we should evaluate their reputation in hosting industry and discuss more with other people. Any effort is valuable before paying, because we need the right service that will work with the best.

Who do we recommend? We have good experience with lots of hosting brands but arvixe is definitely our best recommendation. With arvixe hosting service you can create unlimited sub domains and build different websites for each sub domain!

Visit arvixe for full hosting features on http://www.Arvixe.com


KVM Hosting Secret Revealed

kvm web hosting

KVM and KVM Hosting Introduction

There're actually two explanation to the phrase KVM. One stands for the server managing technology over internet — Keyboard, Video, Mouse. That means to control multiple machines/device via a single box. The other explanation is about server virtualization – Kernel-based Virtual Machine. No matter if it's about server management or virtualization technology, both of them are playing an important role in today's IT industry. In this article we're going to talk about the server virtualization by KVM and compare it's advantages over other technologies. Also, I would like to introduce several popular names for KVM hosting service.

KVM Hosting Server Advantages

The KVM is an open source software which is included in Linux Kernel 2.6.20 and later versions. That means if we want to virtulize our hosting server we don't have to use a third party software but just load this module directly from setup. Using KVM, we can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc. To learn all the features, I highly recommend you check out this page http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/KVM_Features

Generally speaking, all features from the main virtualization solutions are included in KVM.

KVM vs XEN vs OpenVZ

When comes to Server Virtualization Technologies, XEN is probably one of the most famous names. XEN is also an open sourced software and proabably the mostly used one in VPS hosting solution, it's approved to be stable and reliable on production server. Unlike XEN, the KVM is actually part of linux itself and only works with unmodified operation systems on x86 CPU. But such limitation doesn't exist on XEN. At the meanwhile, XEN is supported by lots of third party groups and it's an matured virtualization technology. In some degrees, KVM is light weight XEN but with less features.

How about OpenVZ? OpenVZ is another popular open source virtualization software. The difference comparing to other similar softwares is OpenVZ will virtualize the system OS directly instead of loading os for each VPS instance separately. The OpenVZ can be easily edited on production server for extra server creation. That means OpenVZ based hosting server can be oversold more easily. Because of this, the OpenVZ vps price is normally lower than others.

KVM vs XEN vs OpenVZ, which should I choose? From above explanation we should have found XEN is definitely the best choice for quality live service purpose. Unless you want a live VPS for learning purpose only, we highly recommend XEN solutions.

Best KVM hosting service?

Because KVM is some part new comparing to other virtual server solutions like XEN, it's still on the way of gaining more popularity. Not too many hosting companies are offering this service, but there's positive growth of KVM and more and more third party support are joining up. The Redhat already switched their focus from XEN to KVM which is a positive signal to this product. In case you want to check who's offering KVM hosting at the moment, vservercenter.com and openhosting.com are worthy of checking out. Personally, I don't have any experience with KVM on production server. But because of it's fast growing, it's necessary to check out if you're running an IT service.


Best Vdeck Reseller Hosting

vdeck reseller hosting

What's Vdeck? If you're still not sure yet please visit our older posting Vdeck hosting page for explanation. If you have liked it and interested to be a vdeck reseller hosting provider, then you got the right place. I will guide you how to make the research and help evaluate if it's worthy of the doing.

Vdeck Reseller Hosting Advantages

Vdeck, well known for it's powerful management over both linux and windows hosting. It's by far the only popular hosting control panel solution that managed to do so. Another most outstanding feature with this software is clients be able to manage hosting products, domain registration, email and account billings under the same panel. We don't have to introduce into another customer management system like whmcs for web hosting business. Generally speaking, all essential features from other popular control panels are prepared in Vdeck.

Who offers vdeck reseller hosting?

Because Vdeck is the product of EIG group and it's only deployed to EIG hosting brands. If we want to be vdeck hosting reseller, we have to sign up with one of their hsoting websites like iPage, Fatcow etc. Till present, there're about 100 hosting brands under EIG company. If you're not sure what they are, you can refer to this Vdeck official page to get a short list http://vdeck.com/clients.html. The price of Vdeck reseller hosting program is as cheap as $49.95/yr. It's probably the most affordable reseller program from web hosting industry.

Vdeck Reseller Hosting Core features

Because the eig team offers vdeck reseller hosting program on each hosting website, the explanation and features are almost exactly the same. Here's quick view

  • Dramatic discounts on plans
  • Instant set-up on all plans
  • Discounted domain registrations
  • Discounts starting with the first resold account
  • Priority reseller support for fast answers
  • Powerful reseller console for comprehensive account management
  • Billing manager for each of your resold accounts
  • One-click login for easy account management

We will be able to customize the hosting control panel and setup our own brands in it such as logo, fonts,colors etc. Most features in Vdeck 4 are available in our own branded control panel. If we plan to do hosting business with an affordable solution, the Vdeck reseller hosting program would be quite worth a try.

What should we pay attention to?

Is it as simple as registration on those hosting websites? Absolutely not, before you get started please make sure you read the TOS, and especially the following!

  1. Customer Support — Unlike other popular reseller hosting programs on the web where we leave all technical support/billing etc to the actual hosting company, we have to manage both billing/tech support by our own via Vdeck reseller hosting. It works as we're managing our own hosting company except we don't have to touch the actual hardware stuff.
  2. Payment — At the moment, only credit card is accepted for vdeck reseller hosting, that means our clients will have to pay with credit card, no other options.
  3. Hosting Platform — We have to choose the correct provider for right hosting solutions. For example the iPage is 100% linux based service, if we register reseller program with them we can only create linux hosting plans. If we want to provider windows hosting as well, we need to sign with another service brand such as ipower.

Special Notice

Although we can generate all features from the actual vdeck control panel with the proper reseller program, the reseller based vdeck interface is not the same as what we're familiar with. I can say it's older version layout. Regardless of such difference, the vdeck reseller hosting program is a good deal because we'll learn how to manage clients and support etc, we'll get the valuable experience for web hosting business management. In case we'll finally launch our really self-branded service, this reseller program will help a lot.

Visit ipage for vdeck linux reseller program http://www.ipage.com

Visit ipower for vdeck windows hosting packages http://www.ipower.com


Best Asp.net 4.5 Hosting Unveiled

asp.net 4.5 hosting

asp.net 4.5 has been released for some time since from the last september. From the official documents and various webmasters' feedback, it's ready for production server deployment. Because of the great improvements and new features with this version, .net 4.5 will bring revolutional effect to web design and the web hosting industry. It's possible to see the Microsoft team will integrate this package directly in the next windows server generation.

What's new in Asp.net 4.5?

Asp.net 4.5 core features

  • Support for HTML5 code snipes
  • Asynchronously Reading and Writing HTTP Requests and Responses
  • Improvements to HttpRequest handling
  • Asynchronously flushing a response
  • Support for await and Task-Based Asynchronous Modules and Handlers
  • Asynchronous HTTP modules
  • Asynchronous HTTP handlers
  • New ASP.NET Request Validation Features
  • Deferred ("lazy") request validation
  • Support for unvalidated requests
  • Anti-XSS Library
  • Support for WebSockets Protocol
  • Bundling and Minification
  • Performance Improvements for Web Hosting

The outstanding feature would be the support of HTML5 form types and fast performance. When you create a new Website using ASP.NET or maintaining an existing project, you will be able to use the HTML5 & CSS3 technologies via Visual Studio.

How does Asp.net 4.5 improve the performance? By reducing the number of HTTP requests that go between the client and server. you can  bundle and minify your Jscripts and CSS behind. The result is it will generate a single http request for those js and css instead of creating multiple requests for each one.

Further resource about Asp.net 4.5

Best Asp.net 4.5 Hosting Plan

Arvixe is proudly announced to be the best asp.net 4.5 hosting provider for leading hosting features and advanced server platforms. Arvixe asp.net 4.5 hosting plan is configured on latest windows server 2012 with newest hardware production. You get free domain name and dedicated application pool for your .net 4.5 applications. All advantages just cost you $5/mo!

How to get started with arvixe asp.net hosting service? There's no special configuration required in order to host your 4.5 application on arvixe hosting server. Arvixe support asp.net 4.5 on all windows servers and have upgraded all servers to be fully compatible with .NET 4.5 technology. With websitepanel hosting control panel, you can switch the version easily and instantly without bringing your site down.

Arvixe Asp.net hosting core features

  • Free domain name for life
  • Dedicated Application pool support
  • Remote IIS manager support
  • Windows server 2012 with multiple .net frameworks

Visit arvixe for asp.net hosting full features on http://www.Arvixe.com

Arvixe .net 4.5 hosting

Asp.net 4.5 Hosting FAQs

What's asp.net 4.5 server requirement?

Asp.net 4.5 can be installed on all major windows server and comes as default support on server 2012.

How to publish asp.net 4.5 application to hosting server?

You can use either Web Deploy to publish your website to hosting space or publish to local computer directly then upload to server space via FTP.

How much should you pay for quality asp.net 4.5 hosting service?

Asp.net would be a simple support by leading windows providers. The cost should be less than $5/mo for budget choice.

How to select the best asp.net hosting plan?

The best asp.net 4.5 hosting plan must be affordable with rich features. However, you should always pay attention to the server uptime and support quality. It's not so easy to determine the best choice, you must evaluate the company carefully and speak to sales representative with all your concerns. Also read user reviews about their service for real user experience.


VPS vs VDS, Difference & Relationships

vps vs vds

VPS(Virtual Private Server) and VDS(Virtual Dedicated Server) are always mentioned in virtual server hosting plans. Most of the time they're recognized the same for server virtualization, there's big difference of the actual setup and technologies being used. I would like to make a summary comparison between the two products and look which is the right one we need.

About VPS (Virtual Private Server)

How does VPS setup and work? Normally, vps is setup on the major operating system as a stand alone service. The virtual servers are created within some kind virtualization softwares such as virtuozzo and openvz etc, each vps is setup in "container". The operating system treats the virtualization software as a stand alone service/task, each VPS becomes a sub-task.

From hosting environment, all vps containers on same host machine are loaded from the same OS copy. In this way, it saved the time for duplicated installation and maintenance for support team, and of course the cost is reduced as well.

The popular virtualization softwares for VPS such as OpenVZ or Xen Paravirtualization.

About VDS(Virtual Dedicated Server)

How about VDS? Unlike the VPS working environment, the VDS virtualization is running on hardware level. That means no existing Operating system required to create a VDS instance. Each virtual machine has its own set of resources and can be configured on the fly! Because each virtual server is independently working on hardware level, we can setup any OS just like on physical server. The outstanding aspect is each VDS instance does not affect each other like traditional VPS server.

Although the VDS runs independently from other servers, it's still virtualized by Hypervisor software so all machines are managed within a shared space. VDS solutions provide almost identical services as a dedicated server.

Popular virualization for VDS such as Vmware, Xen HVM or Hyper-V etc.

Whether You need VPS or VDS solution?

From the above explanation we know that VDS has many advantages comparing to VPS. Because of the advantages, the cost of VDS is high. So if the shared environment is never suitable for your business growth and have to upgrade, you should evaluate seriously about what kind of aspects you need for hosting.

Generally speaking if you have a strong technical team on hand and have enough budget, VDS is the ideal choice because you have full control over the server resource and future upgrade is possible. Services will be working exactly the same on small dedicated server. If you want to leave the server maintenance and all tech stuff to hosting support, VPS would be better because only the support team have full access to host machine and doing trouble shoot.

Best VPS Hosting

VPS hosting plans can be found everywhere on the web, however VDS is not so popularily offered for some reasons. Some popular names in VDS offer as far as I can tell are a2hosting and pcsmarthosting. On the other hand, if you need quality vps hosting, we highly recommend to check out http://www.Arvixe.com. Especially when you're looking for quality and affordable windows vps server plans, arvixe is simply the best.