Archive for Web Hosting Articles

A Web Hosting Disaster Recovery Strategy For Safeguarding Business

In the current era, the business information and data is mostly stored in computing machines, hence the need for having a full-proof disaster recovery strategy becomes a key factor for business continuity and safety. Since it an aspect that is different to the routine IT tasks, it becomes necessary to take guidance from experts in the field of IT recovery and restoration. Having a perfect strategy can help businesses make a speedy recovery incase a disaster does strike without an alarm.

DR

All the data stored on the computing machines are crucial for the continuity of business hence underestimated the necessity of data restoration can be fatal. Falling prey to such situations can lead to a complete shutdown of business in an event of IT system failures. In case such failures often occur, it may even cause an impact on the customer’s trust in you hence leading you to a irreversible downfall.

Multiple factors can be a cause for disasters, hence the need for data recovery widens. As we all are aware about the increasing volume of viruses, malwares, hacks etc. that are taking a toll which is inturnincreasing your responsibility of safeguarding your companies mission critical data. Hackers need not always intrude your system for stealing something, many do it for fun, while some have clear intentions of stealing your confidential information and paralyzing your systems completely. It may even be an employee of yours who might have developed hatred due to certain passed incidences, I mean there can be any odd reason that you can least expect.

All these possibilities can be easily dealt by having a skilled technician or a professional and ofcourse an affordable web hosting company deal with your disaster recovery requirements. They would act as mediators for ensuring the safety of your business data where everyone in your organization should adhere to the roles and responsibility empowerment to the outsourced company.
Backup forms a highly crucial aspect of disaster recovery planning. Each element of the data held by an enterprise needs to be backed up on remote storages with the least access to members of the staff. Outsourcing this element to a reliable web hosting UK company can prove to be a wise decision during the course of business.

Much prior to any disaster, you may try the reliability of a company whom you’ve assigned the task of safeguarding your data. This should put you in a better position of finding out the flaws (if any) and taking the corrective measures before-hand inorder to enable you with cutting short the recovery time in event of an actual failure.

If at-all the day arrives without a prior intimation, this mediator would alert you and in the meanwhile initiate the recovery process. So you may go ahead with making a formal disclosure about the incident and update your customers with the steps that have been taken to keep the downtime to a bare minimum, hence helping you to maintain order and decrease chaos.

Since you were already prepared for such a situation, you’d be taking the least possible hit interms of operations and interms of costs, which would then be considered to be an authentic business decision and future planning initiative. At the same time, your responsibility grows larger hence you’d need to implement enhanced recovery techniques and strategies to help tackle the emerging complexities and risks.

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32 Common Questions about Web Hosting

Ask it before selecting a web host

A website and web hosting is the backbone of your online business. Though the criterion for marketing is fully functional, but if the web hosting service gives the bad performance, it can destroy your online business completely.

Here are some important questions listed on critical issues that you should ask the web hosting provider before signing up with them.

Disk Space: Determining the need of disk space is much important, when choosing a web hosting solution. You should also think about a future expansion, so ensure that you don’t hit your disk space limits at a later stage.

  • How much disk space will you get ?
  • Can disk space be upgraded at a later stage ?
  • What is the maximum disk space limit ?

Bandwidth: Most of the uk web hosting companies limit the data that can be transferred and this may prove to be an obstacle if your website is expected to have a large number of visitors.

  • Is there any limit on the data transfer ?
  • What kind of data can be transferred ?

E-mail Accounts: Most of the web hosting companies allow websites to use email clients to check their email. They support both POP and IMAP, and offers SMTP server via which you can connect to the server and send out an e-mail to your customers. POP 3 e-mail is the most popular, because it means that your mail can be viewed from any web browser and Outlook. It is important for businesses to get a cheap web hosting plan that offers multiple email accounts.

  • How many email accounts can I create ?
  • How many emails can I send per hour/day ?
  • What will be the size of mailbox in different packages ?
  • What will be the maximum size of attachment ?

Domain Names: Hosting becomes necessary only when you give a name for your website (ie. domain name). You can get a domain name registered by one of the many domain registrars and then connect the domain name to a particular hosting company. Alternatively, if your web hosting provider offers domain name registration, you can get it registered through them. However, first compare the domain registration price with other domain registrars.

  • Do you offer domain name registration ?
  • What is the cost to register a generic domain name ?

Control: It is very much important to have a better control on your website, which is only possible through an advanced web hosting control panel. The most preferred web hosting control panels are cPanel and Plesk.

  • Which control panels do you offer ?
  • Is the control panel charged extra ?

E-commerce: If you are planning to start an ecommerce website, you must ask the following things.

  • Do you offer SSL certificates ?
  • Do you offer shopping carts ?

Website Design: This is the part where you create your own professional website. Either you can hire a web designer to design a website or you can do it yourself with the help of a Site Builder. Most of the web hosting companies offer Site Builder for free.

  • Do your offer a Site Builder ?
  • Which Site Builder do you offer ?
  • Is it charged or free ?
  • Do you offer website templates with the Site Builder ?

Cost: This is one of the most important factor to be considered. Be sure about what you pay for. Ask them if you think there is a hidden cost.

  • What is the total cost for hosting ?
  • How is the billing cycle ? Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-annually or Annually ?
  • Are there any maintenance charges ?
  • Are there any other extra charges ? If yes, what are they ?

Security: A good web hosting provider is that which does not install unwanted programs, who maintains dual firewalls (ie. hardware and software firewall), fixes loop holes as soon as they are addressed. The servers they offer must be located in remote locations with regular backups that are placed in multiple locations (ie. data center). This ensures that your site is protected from hacking attempts, server issues, power failures and other possible issues.

  • What kind of protection do you offer ?
  • Do you offer hardware firewall ? If yes, how much is it charged ?
  • What are the security measures taken to prevent hacking attempts and DDos attacks ?
  • Do you offer an offsite backup plan ?

Support: The customer and technical support is one of the important decisions that need to be taken. Would you want to wait for hours to get your issues addressed by the support team. Would you like to face a financial loss just because your website was down for 24 hours and the technical support was not available.

  • Do you offer customer and technical support ?
  • What are the different channels through which support is offered ?
  • Is support available for 24/7 ?
  • What is the maximum response time to answer a ticket ?
  • Is technical support charged extra ?

It’s really not as complicated as it seems. You just have to make sure about the things you want from a web hosting company and ensure that the company meets your requirements. With hundreds of uk web hosting companies offering various hosting plans, it might be worth doing a little research and find the best company to avoid the later issues.

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Points to Consider Before Moving to Dedicated Server

More and more online businesses that find themselves with growing traffic really need a better uk web hosting solution to meet their hosting requirements. But, before getting a dedicated server, you need to consider some points. This will ensure that you have not made any mistake and regret your decision.

Cost Factor

The freedom to move to your own server comes with a price. It is usually a lot of money and it is wise to do some cost estimates in advance to see if the dedicated server is affordable. Even if you have money to buy a dedicated server, but maybe you do not have the required technical skills. In such a case, you should hire an administrator who can address the server issues immediately and resolved it in no time. It simply means that you have to add maintenance cost to your budget. It is wise to plan your budget first and then see if the site is large enough to justify the cost before spending on a dedicated hosting plan.

An un-managed or Managed Server

This is an important point that must be considered when planning to buy a dedicated server. Managing a dedicated server can be usually difficult. If you have the technical skills to manage a server which is required to administer servers well, but cannot afford to spend a few hours a week to monitor and secure the server, in such a case, you can also hire an administrator to manage such things as it help a lot.

If you lack technical skills, the managed dedicated server hosting plan is what you should go with. The managed hosting ensures that everything from configuring and server setup to resolving problematic issues is taken care by the web hosting experts.

Bandwidth and its Requirements

One of the more important things to consider when you think of dedicated server is your requirement. It is recommended to choose a dedicated server only if you are short on bandwidth or if your web host cannot handle when the traffic is at its best.

Data Security

Security is an important factor influencing people to bet on a dedicated server, especially people who have highly confidential information on their website. Shared servers are locked down at a high level but the question remains, however, that the server is available to other authorized users, which means that it is a risky proposal.

Understand your need for a dedicated server by analyzing your daily use. Dedicated hosting should be considered only if your website is having high traffic and generates good revenue to support the high cost associated with a dedicated server.

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Things to Look for in a Good Web Hosting Service

When you purchase a web hosting plan, there are plenty of things you need to keep in mind. In this post, I am going to list some important things that need to be looked when buying a web hosting service.

Finding a good web hosting provider is not just about how much money it costs to buy a plan from a particular company, but it ranges from the control panels to customer support. I believe that support is what constitutes a good and reliable uk web hosting service.

Here are few important things that represent a good web hosting service:

Hosting Company & Its Customer Service: One of the most important things that helps in finding a future proof web hosting service is the customer service. Without a good customer support your business won’t be able to live longer. Therefore, make sure that customer service offered by your web hosting provider is available round the clock (ie. 24/7) through different channels.

Well Formed Terms: Some of the web hosting companies use the obscure and misleading terms. Make sure that the conditions are formulated well and easily understandable. If you are not sure about the terms do ask your hosting provider to explain the terms of service.

Physical Security: Your hosting should be far from the place that may be affected by a natural disaster (ie. out of seismic zone). It is something that you wouldn’t want to happen to your hosting company as your website data is stored on their servers. You might lose your data if your web hosting company gets affected by natural disasters.

Company Reputation: The reputation is the another thing that can be useful to find out a good web hosting service. Since, most of the web hosting providers have a good reputation, so it would not tend to be something to worry about.

Server Location: This is something that is much discussed in recent days. Search engines rank websites better depending on the country where your website is hosted (ie. location of server where your website is hosted). Some may say that it doesn’t matter, however, I do personally believe on this, so buy a web hosting service in the targeted country. Hosting your website in the targeted country will help you gaining nice search engine rankings.

Understand what hosting company has to offer: It is much more important that you understand what hosting company has to offer. Most of the people looking for web hosting services are being deceived by the advertisements displayed on other websites. A good web hosting is that which shows very clearly what it have to offer.

Flexibility: Flexibility plays a very significant role in web hosting. Flexibility is something that is really useful when your small website becomes huge and requires better features and resources. In such case, you should be able to upgrade your existing hosting plan according to your requirements or you should be able to switch your hosting plan such as from shared to reseller hosting.

Cost of Hosting: Make sure that the cost of the hosting service you choose is not too high. If the price is too high, you don’t need to worry about as there are always cheaper alternatives available on the Internet.

I hope the above tips are useful to find a good web hosting service for your online business website.

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What might look like a good backup plan ?

Ideally, it is considered that a policy of reliable and secure data backup for small businesses and remote offices should be based on the following criterion:

Automatic Backup: The backup program should consist of an automatic backup scheduler, that shall launch and conduct the backups automatically once the backups are scheduled without the need of human involvement.

Objective: In order to prevent oversights, backups should not be applied during holidays when people are more active on websites.

Transparency of the Backup: The backup process should be totally transparent to the users. While the backups running in the background the user must be able to work on the documents without any issues. The backup process should not create any kind of load on the server.

Objective: Not to harm the work of users who would then be tempted to push the backup.

Centralized Backup System: Ideally, for companies of significant size that manage a larger installed base should be able to manage the backups centrally. In accordance with the backup policy, the administrator would be the person who decides on common parameters and handles all positions and servers.

Objective: To guarantee a consistent backup policy across the enterprises along with the data protection according to their importance.

Remote Backups: Remote backup is one of the most important factor to be considered. The backing up your data should be held to geographically separated locations far away from your premises. This is because a loss could damage your backups as well.

Objective: To have a free backup to restore in case of any disaster relating to the website of your company.

Also, never forget the primary function of an online backup plan (ie. data recovery). The backup software used must offer you the ability to access the backed up data through a web client. The user should be able to restore the whole backup and specific files and folders as well.

This backup and restore process must be done via a secure https protocol, in which it authenticates using the login id and password. Depending upon the above mentioned criteria an offsite backup hosting plan should be chosen to ensure the data safety of your dedicated server.

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