Do you really need 500 GB of space and a terabyte of bandwidth? What about that quad-core server you’ve been renting for the last twelve months? While web hosting needs often increase over time, they can decrease as well, often without you realizing it.

If you have a high-end web hosting plan or a large server, it might be worthwhile to double check and see if you are really using what you’re paying for. You might discover that while you needed a dual-core server a few months ago due to a high traffic event, things are back to normal and single core machine will suffice. Or maybe you overestimated your needs when you bought that $29.99 web hosting plan.

Either way, it’s a smart idea to double-check your hosting usage. You could save hundreds of dollars.

Continue reading: Reconsider your hosting needs and save money

The incident apparently began with the FBI monitoring certain web blogs for terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda is known to operate and spread their communication through the Internet, but the odd part about this shut down is that it was a community web service with many users.

The blogging service, Blogetery, reportedly hosted over 70,000 blogs, and most of those users had nothing to do with terrorism. Furthermore, the owner of the service is not being accused of terrorist activity either. The hosting company, Burst.net sent a warning to Alexander Yusupov to take down the sites but did not supply any official evidence of the FBI investigation. The FBI says that it did not order the service to be shut down and that Burst.net took that action on its own.

The sad part of all of this is that possibly thousands of blogs have just been erased from the Web with little regard for the innocent people who used them. The lesson to be learned, however, is that any website or service should have backups, even if the content is created by other users. Furthermore, with as many as 70,000 blogs, they also should have had some type of redundancy in place to prevent total data loss, even if it were accidental.

Source: Times Newsline

Continue reading: Hosting Company Shuts Down Blogging Service

If you own a business and don’t have a website, it’s time to get with the plan. You may already have someone to design your site and a domain, but what about business web hosting?

For most small business websites, shared hosting is more than adequate. If you have a simple HTML site and don’t plan on receiving much traffic, you should not pay more than £7 a month for a hosting plan.

If your site uses a content management system (CMS) or has a lot of Flash content, a VPS would be a good investment if you will receive more than 400 visitors per day. Busier sites might need a dedicated server.

There are many hosting providers out there that offer “business web hosting,” but any web host will work just fine. Just make sure you are comfortable with the level of support offered. Medium and large businesses often host sites in-house.

Continue reading: Business web hosting

If you are in the market for hosting, you’ve probably seen a number of terms thrown around. Words like ’shared hosting,’ ‘VPS’ and ‘reseller plan’ make perfect sense to people in the industry, but hosting gurus often take for granted that newcomers understand these definitions. Here’s a brief guide to the most common types of hosting:

Shared hosting- This is the most common type of web hosting. The host gives you a set amount of bandwidth and disk space, but hosts you on a server with hundreds or even thousands of other customers. Shared hosting is perfect for small websites.

Reseller hosting- Similar to shared hosting, but offers more disk space and bandwidth plus the ability to host others. This is a good choice if you want to split the cost of hosting with multiple people.

Continue reading: Types of Hosting Explained

Verio Europe is a new presence in the European web services market, with Verio taking over the small business division of NTT Europe Online. Verio Europe will be based in Germany and will offer online services for SMBs, including domain registration, hosting and backup services.

With the internet becoming such an essential part of any business, small businesses really can’t be without a support network that looks after the domain and web hosting side of things. The Verio Europe division will continue to provide Verio expertise in the EMEA region. It will be a bridge for new and existing customers to access both European and worldwide web hosting services.

Source | TheWHIR
Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Verio opens European subsidiary: small business web hosting services

If you recall from a post here several months ago, the U.S. government only utilizes 7% of its server capacity. Although it’s important to leave room to grow, wasting so many resources is costly.

It is also a bad idea to over-utilize a server. For most applications, you do not want to be using more than 70% of your CPU or memory on a regular basis. When you constantly find that intensive applications are chewing up 80%, it’s time to migrate to a server with more headroom.

Using too many server resources also causes instability and will crash a site in the event of a traffic spike. Finding the balance between too much hosting and too little is key.

Continue reading: How much of your server should you utilize?

Everyone is going green these days, including web hosts. Those in the market for a new web host have probably seem the term “green web hosting” thrown around a lot. But just what makes a host green?

Unfortunately, there are no set standards regulating what constitutes “green.” A host can burn Christmas trees to power its servers and call itself “green.” If the company is reputable it will explain why it is green.

Most buy carbon credits to offset their emissions, but some actually use renewable energy such as wind or solar power. The latter is the most eco-friendly option, but usually yields a price premium because of the added costs involved for the company. Regardless of what option you choose, green hosts are an excellent way to give back to the environment.

Photo | clix

Continue reading: What is green web hosting?

These days, it seems like everyone has a friend of cousin in the web hosting business. Most of these people entering the industry thinking, “I’ll just get a reseller account or VPS, rely on friends to and family to refer clients, and make thousands of dollars without doing any work.” In truth, there are much better ways to earn a living. Here are 3 reasons why you should not start a web host:

1. People need help all the time
Customers don’t take care of themselves. Expect to be on your hands and knees catering to their every whim. Urgent support tickets never come at convenient times. Someone might be polite on a good day.

2. Something will go wrong that you won’t know how to fix.
Too many people get into the web hosting business without the adequate IT skills. Routine tasks like server hardening, installing Apache, and setting up cron jobs in Linux shouldn’t be an issue. But for many new host owners, it is.

3. Your host will be no different from all the others.
There are tens of thousands of small web hosts. They all use the same ugly web templates and flash intros. Chances are good your features and prices won’t be much different, either. Better hope you can afford a multi-million dollar marketing firm to make your company stand out.

Photo | mikekorn

Continue reading: 3 reasons you should not start a web host

Choosing the right control panel for a dedicated server can be one of the most important things you do. The right choice can increase productivity and generally make your life easier. Here are a few of the most popular:

cPanel and WHM (Web Host Manager)

cPanel is one of the most widely used hosting control panels and is a favorite among unmanaged server data centers, as they can offer it to their clients and not require much external support. It primarily runs on Linux. Starting price: $425 per year.

Plesk

Plesk is another widely-used control panel, sold by Parallels. It runs on Windows, Linux, and other Unix operating systems. Starting price: $839.88.

Virtualmin

Virtualmin is a free and open source option for web hosting, created by the makers of Webmin. The company also offers a paid license that includes support called Virtualmin Pro. Starting Price: $0 or $138.00.

SysCP

SysCP is another free open source control panel, primarily for Linux operating systems. It offers support for third-party modules and automation. Starting Price $0.

In addition to the above, some web hosts offer powerful custom-designed control panels, although they still often offer a choice for the dedicated server clients.

Continue reading: 4 Top Hosting Control Panels

Also known as guild hosting, clan hosting is a type of web host service provided to online gaming communities. Players of MMORPGs and multiplayer FPS games often form groups called clans and purchase web hosting to represent themselves online.

While a clan website is hosted just like any other site, hosts in the gaming community often offer a number of specialized services. These include automatic installation on forums, game-themed website templates, and in some cases a payment scheme that lets clan members split the cost of the hosting.

Gamers often pay a premium for this type of hosting. In reality, guild hosting is no different than regular hosting. In fact, gaming communities probably use traditional hosts in larger numbers.

Photo | mzacha

Continue reading: What is clan hosting?

One common mistake that web hosting resellers make is jumping into the hosting business without any solid plan for customer management. In an ideal world, customers always pay on time and upgrades always go according to plan. The fact is, however, both you and your customers will make mistakes. The important thing to do is to have systems in place to remedy any problematic situations.

There are many customer management tools on the market, but not all of them are catered to web hosting. In particular, the best way to make sure payments are received on time is to have some type of recurring billing setup. Hosting is usually relatively inexpensive, and most customers will not mind having a small amount deducted from their credit cards or PayPal accounts each month.

The other important aspect of customer management is communication. Keep in regular contact with your customers. Many conflicts that happen when dealing with people online are the result of misunderstandings. With email, social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, and your website’s blog, you can stay in contact with your customers without being overly invasive. Welcome to the world of web hosting, and good luck.

Photo Source: Flickr

Continue reading: Managing Reseller Payments

If you’re like most people, you expect companies to have normal-sounding names. Why would a business risk success with a less-than-stellar play on words? One blog’s compilation of some odd web host, names, just goes to show you that anything is possible on the web. Here are some of the worst names from the list:

1. InternetTrash.com
“The only place for trashy, tasteless, useless, politically incorrect, silly, stupid, meaningless, obnoxious, waste of bandwidth homepages! Normal & ordinary homepages also welcome!”

2. Chicken-shit.dk
Because chicken shit is so appealing.

3. Datapimp.com
Perhaps this now defunct host couldn’t keep its hoes in line?

4. GoDaddy.com
This popular web host also owns gomommy.com.

5. ScreamingPeacock.com
I didn’t know peacocks could scream.

Continue reading: Worst web host names ever