Web Hosting Services

Managed hosting 'improves disaster recovery'

2009-03-13T10:39:00.000-07:00

Managed hosting provides better access to data and more efficient disaster recovery than office-based IT, it has been claimed. Managed hosting allows an end-user to connect to centrally-based information from wherever they are.

Having it hosted means that you've got that accessibility anywhere and in general you also get better availability and backups. That's the general benefit of getting a hosted service opposed to buying servers and software and sticking it under someone's desk.

When people understand their data, applications and software can be better looked after through managed hosting than they can do themselves, more people in the IT and technology industries will begin working from home.

In January, virtualization is becoming increasingly popular, with 50 per cent of UK businesses using it to cut costs. To know more about Managed hosting services and server virtualization, visit http://www.navisite.com

Source: Google News

Managed Hosting - What You Need to Know

2009-03-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

As a small business owner I have been looking into the different types of host packages and services available. I have decided to go for a managed hosting service. Managed hosting refers to a hosting solution for a website where the site is housed and managed on a dedicated secure server. The customer leases a server for their own use and therefore they do not have to share the server with other clients. Having your server has a number of advantages in terms of security and management. Below I have listed the five main areas I feel you need to consider before deciding on your managed hosting provider.

Operating System
One of the major advantages of having a dedicated server is that you can chose which operating system is used to manage and run the server. The operating system depends on personal preference, its worth talking to you web development team and asking them which one is the best for your website. Linux operating systems are often bundled in free with the hosting plan, Microsoft SPLA or other Red Hat systems may require extra payment. You need to ask the hosting provider if the package includes updates to the OS, service packs, patches and software upgrades.

Management
Managed hosting as the name suggests will include a degree of management but there is no industry wide standard to clarify what the management element will contain. For some providers it is having a full team of service engineers waiting to sort out any issues that arise for other it is simply having a control panel that you can access yourself. Depending on your own experience and skills in website hosting you need to ensure that the service level won't leave you in a blind panic if something goes wrong. Managed hosting is normally set at three different service levels:
Self Managed - This is the basic or bronze level package that would include some maintenance and updating but customers manage most of the services themselves.

Managed - The next level up, the silver level package would normally contain monitoring, updates and limited levels of support.

Fully Managed - The gold standard of management hosting. A fully managed service should be like having your own IT department. You should get monitoring, reboots, security, OS upgrades, customer support and software updates.

Security
Dealing with issues of security and keeping all the software and operating systems patched and updated is one of the great advantages of managed hosting. You shouldn't have to worry about the security of your site as the security measures provided by your hosting provider should be the most current. You need to check that security updates are included in the service level you have signed up to.

Software
Much like the choice of Operating System you can also chose the software that will run on your managed server. You can pick and mix your database software and other applications that might be required to run video and audio on your website. The choice of control panel software is important as these can be as simple of complex as you require them to be. They can be configured to allow you to control all aspects of the server remotely via a web based interface.

Bandwidth
You will also need to set and pay for the amount of bandwidth you think you are going to use. Purchasing bandwidth via a managed server provider often works out cheaper than attempting to purchase the service in isolation. Economies of scale allow managed hosting providers to get discounts on the base cost of bandwidth. There is no industry benchmark or pricing structure for bandwidth. It can be sold as part of the package or as add on depending on projected usage. It is worth setting the bandwidth limit higher than you think you will use as most providers will pile on the cost if you go over your allotted usage.

Once you have addressed these issue you can then think about making a choice about which managed hosting service provider best fits your requirements. You need to make sure you have sorted out which OS and software is running, how secure the server is, the level of management involved and the provision of adequate bandwidth. Take you time and make sure you are completely comfortable with the service. Don't be afraid to ask questions and get clarification on technical issues.

Web hosting 101: What to look for?

2009-02-27T05:07:00.000-08:00

Today, I came across an interesting article on 'Web Hosting' in CNN Money. The article shed significant light on how to look out for the best web hosting services that can grow with your business. Thought to share it with all of you.

Here it goes:

If your business has an online presence, picking a Web host is one of the most critical decisions you'll make. The host manages the servers on which your site will run and literally has control of your company's connection to its customers.

But picking the right one can be daunting: Because most major hosting companies offer similar features, it takes some sleuthing to figure out which one will best suit your company's needs.

A quick overview
As you start your research, be wary of side-by-side comparison sites. Some are affiliated with hosting companies - their "reviews" are actually paid advertisements. While it's good practice to use a wide variety of sources to get multiple opinions, it's best to conduct your own fact-check with the host itself, which may require a thorough look through the fine print.

Some hosting companies contribute financially to Herskovitz's site, payments that he says help defray the site's operating costs, but Top 10 Web Hosting's reviews process is editorially independent.

After you've identified legitimate resources for comparing hosts, the next step is to evaluate the features most vital to small businesses.

Customer service
Hosting experts say good support is the most crucial issue for a small business owner. Nothing is more frustrating than paying on a monthly basis and not being able to get through to customer service for hours and then having to pick up the pieces after the damage is done.

Make sure that support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week," suggests Herskovitz. "Technical problems could occur any time."

Test the hosts by calling or e-mailing them with questions and concerns. If they can't deliver an answer within 24 hours, ditch 'em. Contrary to popular belief, it's not technical issues that usually require immediate responses. It's the legal ones.

There are many small business Web sites taken down without notice, causing headaches and financial setbacks. Web sites that allow users to post content are particularly risk. Under current law, if copyright owners find their work illegally posted on a Web site, they can send a message to those who run the site demanding the content's removal. Those messages usually go to the Web host.

"The hosts tend to have a knee-jerk reaction when they get these notices, and they pull down the site without question," Syverson says. "The unfortunate part is that the host is not required to look into the matter but is required to take down all alleged infringing content. Hence, bogus claims can shut down a site. This is why it's important for the host company to be responsive."
If a site gets shut down, the business owner can file a counter notification within 10 days, and then the burden is on the complainant to file a copyright infringement suit in court. The process, lasting days to weeks, usually results in lost business.

(One way to keep this from happening is to ask those who see copyright infringement to contact you directly. Remember to publicly provide an e-mail address.)

Reliability
Reviews from current users, on forums, can give you a sense of how reliable a Web host is. Does it have effective backups to prevent data from being lost? Does it often shut down for maintenance?

Disk space
Once you've established which companies have five-star support levels, the next thing you should look at are the specs for their hosting plans. What's best will vary depending on your site's needs - both now and in the future. If you'll be using the site as an online business card for your crafts business, for example, you probably won't need many features. But be sure to think ahead. As you grow, you may want to start selling those crafts online, and you'll be out of luck if the host you chose doesn't have a quality checkout application.

"Disk space" is the amount of content and data that you can store on your host's server. If you've only got text, there's little you'll need to worry about. But if you've got images, downloads or audio and visual files, pay attention to what is offered.

"Most simple Web pages average about 40KB in size," says Herskovitz. "Thumbnail images will probably be about 2KB or 3KB, and full-size images can be kept to as low as 150KB to 200KB without sacrificing too much in the way of quality. An 8-second video clip will be about 1MB in size. Any site that is graphic-intensive or has downloadable files will need a large amount of disk space for storage."

NaviSite Wins FindMyHost Editors' Choice Award for Its Dedicated Hosting Solutions

2009-01-20T05:54:00.000-08:00

NaviSite, Inc., a leading provider of Enterprise Hosting and Application Services, has won the FindMyHost.com Editors' Choice Award in January 2009 for its hosted dedicated server products for small and medium sized businesses. With a focus on bringing enterprise class reliability and performance to the SMB market, NaviSite's Dedicated Hosting division has raised the bar on customer expectations by delivering a cost effective suite of fully managed dedicated server products, applications, and support services designed specifically for small and medium sized businesses.

The key criteria factored into FindMyHost's decision to recognize NaviSite with their award were the team of 'Always There' TM support professionals, enterprise grade hardware platforms, and an extensive offering which included range of Linux and Windows managed dedicated and virtual server plans. FindMyHost also identified 100% Service Level Agreements, an award-winning comprehensive control panel, and unwavering commitment to deliver a premium customer experience as evidence of NaviSite's excellence in serving the SMB marketplace.

"NaviSite has leveraged its extensive experience in the enterprise arena to bring a whole new class of service to the managed dedicated hosting industry," said Sumeet Sabharwal, Senior Vice President of Dedicated Hosting. "As the service and support needs of our SMB customers are similar to large businesses, we have built an offering that is anchored around enterprise class reliability, performance and service. We are pleased to be recognized by this award and will continue providing solutions with the best value in the industry."

"Editors' Choice Award winners must exceed expectations in a series of rigorous benchmarks and we strongly believe that NaviSite's experience, qualifications and dedicated server products are more than worthy of this recognition," said Christian Henning, President, FindMyHost, Inc. "The selection of NaviSite's Dedicated Hosting solutions is a strong vote of confidence for small and medium sized businesses who need enterprise class solutions and services."

NaviSite's dedicated hosting solutions feature the latest technology, including dedicated servers with Intel® Quad-Core CPUs, Red Hat®, CentOS, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 or 2003®, and Virtual Dedicated Servers with VMware. Other available advanced services include shared and dedicated Cisco® firewalls, shared and dedicated load balancers, Parallels Plesk control panels, managed backup, and SAN storage.

About FindMyHost
FindMyHost, Inc. is an online magazine that provides editor reviews, consumer hosting news, interviews discussion forums and more. FindMyHost.com was established in January 2001 to protect web host consumers and web developers from making the wrong choice when choosing a web host. FindMyHost.com showcases a selection of web hosting companies who have undergone their approved host program testing and provides reviews from customers.

About NaviSite
NaviSite is a leading provider of enterprise hosting and application solutions. Over 1,500 customers depend on NaviSite for managed application services, application development, implementation and management on its web infrastructure platforms in 17 state-of-the-art data centers supported by more than 650 professionals. NaviSite provides customized and scalable solutions leveraging its broad range of application development capabilities, packaged software implementation expertise, deep portfolio of best in class technologies, and a full suite of web-hosting and internet infrastructure options.

Linux vs. Windows: Which is a better Web host?

2009-01-16T09:40:00.000-08:00

It's not that there aren't differences between the two. Security, programming languages, and more all differ between Linux and Windows. But it's a great coup for Linux to note that, if anything, the functionality available for Linux meets and often exceeds that provided by Windows, making one's choice less about operating systems and more about the Web host's other services:

It is better to pick a Web host based on its features and services rather than on what operating system...is running on its Web servers, as the difference between the two is very little. However, if your Web site particularly requires a certain language due to the programmers you work with...it would be prudent to check for system compatibility before subscribing to a Web host.

If you do not require such specific details, you should simply sit back and let the Web host handle these complicated technical details, and focus on your Web site itself. After all, the content is way more important than the programming language or the OS of the Web servers.
Some will argue with this contention, suggesting that Linux is always better than Windows (or vice versa). It's simply not true--not anymore at least.

I believe that this is a huge step forward for Linux. It has narrowed the functionality and ease-of-use gap and, if anything, has put some distance between itself and Windows as it steps into the lead.

This is what we should want for any operating system: less attention on the operating system and more attention on higher-level features and services. It makes Linux and Windows, in this case, foundations for what users really care about. How well the operating system does its job and then gets out of the way, without calling too much attention to itself, should be the next decade of OS competition.

Popularity of Managed Services

2008-12-17T09:16:00.000-08:00

Hi,
Check out this article posted by one of my dear friends David Smith. He is an expert writer and writes for famous article websites like goarticles, articlesbase, articlealley, A1article, and many many more. He shared an article on managed services with me a few days back. I really like it and thought to present it to you all.

His article talks a lot abt the upcoming trend of using managed services by IT companies.
Here is the article:

Popularity of Managed Services
Don’t let the downtime be a fact of your business. Your website is your online tool and is directly tied to your business success. Your tight budget limits may not allow you to have your own dedicated IT staff. However, with the help of managed services, you can have your own personal IT staff to control everything proactively without worrying for any overhead expenditure. You will have all your services and applications managed 24x7 from a central console.

Whether it’s about patch management, virus updates, data back-ups, server monitoring, networking or reporting, you can handle all using breakthrough technology. Managed Services take away the headaches of failures by moving away from a break.

There is no dearth of highly experienced web hosting companies providing all managed services at the most competitive prices suiting to your business and budget. The best example is NaviSite Inc., where you can get your entire web hosting requirements (managed services, hosting solutions, server monitoring) catered in the best possible way. Moreover, they have got the highly qualified as well as the certified technicians to handle all the technical bottlenecks hampering the productivity of your business.

Managed services have come up as boon for small to medium sized businesses as these services offer a unique business model that aligns IT with the goals and objectives of the organization. Connectivity errors, network problems, server downtime are some of the errors that directly impact the profitability of the managed service providers. All such providers follow a rigorous troubleshooting model to prevent hitches instead of the traditional consulting model where service providers love to extract more compensation in name of more problems.

Also, there are other numerous benefits of managed services. Since everything is managed remotely, this means lesser onsite visits and more of the utilization of your workforce and earning potential. With the help of managed services, you can address multiple issues for different clients while engaged in concurrent remote sessions. So, all the benefits lead to no more haggling over invoices with clients.

Hope you wil also like it.

Don't let the downtime be a fact for your business!!!

2008-11-28T05:47:00.000-08:00

Hi Guys!

I'm really very happy to see the response my blog is getting. People are asking me about the best web hosting companies one should turn to. Well! I think this depends on your specific business needs coz there is no dearth of good service providers.....Oh! This just came to my mind.... Why not to make this today's topic of discussion and let me take you through the things that will help you to choose the best web hosting provider for your company:

1)
Before starting your search for the top web hosting provider, it will be good to first know the actual meaning of a good web host. What say? The web host is really a service provider who your website ( the tool of your online presence) on a server connecting to the Internet. Thus, when you think about finding the best web hosting company, ensure that its server runs fast and that the provider offers near total uptime since you don’t want your website to be inaccessible because of the bad server. Shud I move ahead? I think you are saying yes.... At times, its better to assume yourself. :-)

2)
Nowadays, you will find a multitude of web hosting companies boasting to have been offering standardized like the ability to handle or provide the best customer support either through phone, email or through the web. Cummon! When everyone will offer the same, why will you need to look oit for the unique one. So, think about out of the box features. Choose the one that offers you all managed services and hosting solutions under single roof. Ask about their list of services and see ;if they suit your requirements or not. If you guys wanna my suggestion, I'm the biggest fan of NaviSite Inc. It has got everything. Still, you can always shop around.

3)
Here comes the price. Choose the one which offers you the most competitive price but never compromise on the quality of services. Also, base your decision on popularity which can be judged by looking at awards won by that particular web hosting company, good web hosting reviews about it and whether it gets a lot of traffic or not. Next, you should look at reliability factor.

4) Since your business needs to be up all the time, always look out for 24x7 support. As such, its common with all the web hosting provider. Still check out whether you can depend on them. If you need 24-hour technical support that larger companies need then expect to pay substantially more.

That's all for today. Hope my readers will find out their answers to how to choose best web hosting and managed hosting companies from my post.

God Bless All.

The Promise of Hosting Services

2008-11-24T06:08:00.000-08:00

No doubt, hosting is changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT. And this is one of the reasons why the market has become more attractive.

The domain of Web hosting services is further categorized into multiple segments including:

Managed hosting
Enterprise hosting
Email Hosting
Image Hosting
Colocation
Dedicated Hosting
Ah! there are so many of them......

Anyway lets start with the managed services first:

In today's competitive marketplace, businesspersons are looking for resources to save money while making the most of existing investments. Competition is forcing them to concentrate more on customer-facing operations and to allocate their non–core, back-end operations to vendors, which may include outsourcing network management and design. This is forcing more and more organizations to turn towards managed services as a way to conduct business.

But what does this actually mean? Let's intrude:

'Managed Services' is a broad platform denoting multiple, usually flexible, services and engagement models. It enables moving responsibility for operations or business process to an outside party. When there are limited resources, outsourcing shifts the burden of network responsibility away from the main operator to the equipment vendor.

Engagement models largely depend on the processes outsourced. For example, out-tasking is a model in which one process or functional area is managed by an external party – this is usually a specific pain point solution. A build-operate model means the service provider out-tasks implementation and transition as well as operation of a new service.

However, hosting represents a different solution in a different way. Here, the entire service is outsourced, while business process outsourcing concerns outsourcing a process and not a specific function; it is about looking for end-to-end efficiency within the process.

As opposed to the things that used to happen a decade before, the managed-services-as-engagement-models are quite organised and efficient enough. Now, most things have come up into the exposure. Industry people know what works and what does not, thereby significantly lowering the risk in choosing this model as a way to do business.

Well! I will soon be back with more.....

Why To Choose Managed Hosting Services?

2008-11-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

Are you looking out for investing in managed hosting for your company‘s website or any other application? If yes, then you are moving into the right way. There are the companies that don’t want to explore outside sources and generally end up with costly as well as risky proposition. Well! You can save your business with the help of managed hosting services.

Outlined below are the reasons why you should buy managed hosting services from the third party service:

No down time – Your website is the source of your online presence. This makes it important that kit is always working to ensure visitors’ satisfaction. If you are among the people who handle their web site on their own dedicated server, you will find that your site hangs a lot. After all, servers are really difficult to keep running. Moreover, they require regular updates. Here managed hosting services come to your rescue.

If you don’t have a full fledged IT staff to take care of technical issues, you may end up waiting a while for a service. On contrary to this, managed hosting services bring an in-house staff as well as expertise of proficient who handle all the things from their data centre. Furthermore, most services have a duplicate of your site or application ready to run if one version ends up going down for repairs or maintenance. So no downtime!!!

Better equipment – Setting up a dedicated server in your own office can be really expensive. This will not only need you to hire experts to help with the installation but you will also have to purchase all the necessary hardware equipments. And you need to keep the pace with your budget as well, so you're not going to be able to afford great equipments.

Availing managed hosting services from the third party allows you to leverage the benefits of great equipments without actually buying or maintaining them. These people are said to have the best hardware because they want it to last. Their business depends on its longevity.

Better security – You must have been acquainted of the fact of the hackers getting into company information or of viruses causing a nuisance and corrupting necessary files. Since managed hosting providers specialize in IT, they can take better care of your business security. They know exactly what steps to take to protect their clients' applications.

Improved back-up – Taking back ups can seem to be a nasty as well as time consuming task but are, of course, essential to ensure safety of important data stored in your systems hard drives or servers. Managed hosting providers also offer back-ups for whatever you want to save on their equipment.

Exceptional technical support – Getting the best technical support services can be really challenging especially when you don’t have a proper IT staff. And in case of extreme circumstances like site downtime or bad server connection, you need to act immediately to prevent loss of customers. The good news is that managed hosting providers offer 24x7 technical support.