Do I Require a Dedicated Server?

You had many choices to make when you made the decision to start your own website. Most likely you were offered many design choices, email addresses, blogging interfaces, and e-commerce choices. Once your decision is made on everything above, it is necessary to decide about hosting and the different kinds you would like for your website. Most of the people start the computer business in a small manner and hence they would not need too much on the hosting server. A lot of people decide to go with basic or deluxe shared hosting.

The meaning of shared hosting is that many websites are being hosted on a single served. Often, this is all that is needed by a small business owner. What if your level of business increases, or if your clients assume that their information and business will be handled confidentially? Are you nervous about someone hacking into your server and causing damage on your website? Can one ensure that one's database and server are secure from unauthorized visitors? Definitely, there is. A dedicated server is how you can be sure of this guarantee.

In contrast to other types of servers, a dedicated server is distinct. Not like a shared server that is not secure. When hosting companies get customers ready to host, the selection of shared servers is used often, hard drive space and monthly bandwidth is shared by each customer on the server. If you use this method, you can have a lot of security issues with people on that server. The complete opposite of this is a dedicated server.

The only thing on that server will be you and your website. Only you can access and use a "dedicated" server. A dedicated server would be a good idea if you are running a highly confidential website such as a banking institution, doctor's website, high traffic ecommerce site, and anything with content-sensitive material.

Numerous banks and hospitals employ dedicated servers for hosting their sites. A dedicated server can easily be obtained by asking for one from your hosting company. Be aware, unlike shared hosting, that there can be hefty fees associated with the monthly use of a dedicated server, since you have a server for you alone. There is no other way to share your costs. In order to view the dedicated server plans that are available to meet your website hosting needs, check with your present hosting company.

There are tons of pluses regarding using designated servers. One primary advantage is its security. Now it will be impossible for someone to hack into your website. You have the rights to the server and everything that is included in that. You have maximum storage space, more bandwidth, data transfer, and above all you have your own control panel.

Most control panels use Plesk Cpanel. And with the Cpanel come the many choices in software, for instance: Wordpress, PHPBB, Joomla (CMS), Drupal, Siteframe, phplinks, MySQL databases, phpAdmin, apache, and the list goes on! However, dedicated servers tend to be costly as it was previously discussed. Rather than renting shared space, often it is more cost efficient to obtain a dedicated server.

Consider all these things before you choose and then ponder over them for a while. Before making your choice to switch to a dedicated server or to stay with a shared server, decide whether or not you can risk any compromises in your website's security. If security is not an issue as much as lots of bandwidth, then maybe you could upgrade your shared server. But if you deal with credit cards and other personal information on your site, you should really consider switching to a dedicated server hosting plan. It's better to be safe than sorry.

If you need a dedicated server, Alojate.com is the best web hosting company in Mexico, offering a range of services for all business needs. Dedicated servers, factura electronica, web hosting & domain registration.

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Bluehost Review

For those who are in touch with the webhosting world, the name Bluehost might ring a few bells. This company is one of the oldest web hosting services out there. For this sole fact, Bluehost has strived to change and increase its services to attract new customers and keep the old.

The Plan

The first change that they made, which is perhaps the most important, is its cheap and easy plan. It's based on a Linux control panel, which is in this writer's opinion, the best control panel ever. For a two-year contract, you have to pay a reasonable $6.95 per month. For a yearly contract however, you need to fork over an extra $1.

The Features

Its features are astounding for the price it is offering. The level of customization available for this host is a site administrator's wet dream. Users can modify PHP (.htaccess, Custom PHP.INI Files) and has Shell access/SSH, which is a boon for advanced users. You have unlimited number of domain, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited space. It has a top-of -the -line protection mechanism for DDOS and a power backup service. For file transfers, they require users to send a photo of themselves and their driver's license to their headquarters. That shows you how serious they are about security.

This host also proffers an easy and user friendly control panel. Users will get to know their site's important statistics by just glancing through one page. Its features and associated services are categorized and given symbols to facilitate users. As if that's not enough, a search function is available to ease the search for a specific feature. You can check out a demo login at the Bluehost website to get a taste.

The Performance

Performance-wise, this host stands above others. A test account showed an average of 99.5% for nine months. This is not exactly up to par to their advertisement which states 99.9% uptime, but you have to admit that 99.5% is quite impressive. Another interesting note is that downtime decreases the longer the account is used. From February to September, downtime decreased from 471 minutes to 1 minute. The message is clear, the longer you stay with Bluehost, the better their service will be.

The Help

Despite all those sterling positives that have been promoted, Bluehost does lack in one thing, its support. Although it does has a 24/7 toll free service, its online help was a bit of a letdown. Like any other service, it does have an online chat room and an email help service. But, response time is not the fastest around and this might not bode well with the users. If you need help and you rather not call, you are better off reading the FAQ articles.

The Verdict

However, one downside is not enough to contend with this host's incredible features and cheap prices. This service has received mostly good reviews from users all over the world, some which use Bluehost to maintain quite popular sites. This host is suitable for both casual and professional site administrators. It is especially useful to those who want a cheap host and a short contract period.

If you enjoy reading this, you may enjoy to read more about Web Hosting Reviews and read BlueHost Reviews

How to Reduce Web Hosting Bandwidth

At times exceeding your monthly bandwidth would mean higher monthly hosting bills and that could have long-term implications on your hosting budget. Some hosting companies may charge an additional fee for exceeding the monthly bandwidth allowance also referred to as "bandwidth overage". For the novice Webmaster it is important to understand what exactly is bandwidth usage, how much bandwidth is required by his/her website and most importantly how can he reduce his website hosting bandwidth.

Bandwidth refers to the total amount of information that has been served to your web site visitors each month. So every time, the visitor requests information or downloads files from your website, your bandwidth would go up by a specific amount. The size of the file is directly proportional to the bandwidth usage. Also, more the traffic your website receives, more would be the bandwidth consumption. Bandwidth or the data transfer rate is the speed with which data can be transmitted from one device to another. Data rates are often measured in megabits (million bits) or megabytes (million bytes) per second.

It is important to determine the amount of bandwidth that your website would require in order to balance your hosting budget. You can determine your bandwidth requirement by estimating the file size for each web page and then multiplying that figure by the number of pages on your website. Let us explain this with an example. If a web page comprises of two 15Kb images and 3Kb of html, then the web page would have a total data of 33kb. Now multiply this by the number of page views you expect to have per month (e.g. 100,000 per month). This would mean that 3.3Gb of data needs to be transferred per month for that page.

Now by calculating the final figure for each page you would get a rough estimate of the amount of bandwidth required for your website.

If the user requires a reduction in the monthly bandwidth consumption, then a few points and tips can help him achieve this.

The user can reduce the size of the files on their website like the images and graphics. So for a large image size of (e.g. 200KB), by reducing the file size to 20KB the web owner can dramatically minimize their bandwidth usage as well as speed up their website performance.

Websites that feature MP3 downloads, movies, music, large images or other multimedia enabled features, then the website bandwidth requirement would increase substantially.

On the other hand, a simple text based website or a website featuring html pages or small images would require a lower bandwidth.

It is vital to determine beforehand the amount of bandwidth that your website would in order to avoid loss in revenue or traffic. Once you have a specific figure, you will be ready to receive more traffic and subsequent sales. You can also avoid paying a higher bandwidth fee for additional bandwidth usage.

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