In our experience, every day we encounter dozens of companies who waste their computational power, their server to go to really provide a few thousand visits, to a very high cost. Legacy of the past, the use of dedicated servers is often not optimized on servers with different cores and GB of RAM, you are finally able to serve a few hundred visits , below is the real potential hardware.

The reason: These servers are not well configured, do not have any type of optimization, and often result in damage to the company where they slowly serve web pages and the hosted websites

Recycle your old server, switching to VPS Hosting and instances of Cloud Hosting

There are a large number of dedicated servers or colocation who have several years of service and have a very high operating cost for their clients. We’re talking about machines that have processors with minimum 2 Core , 2 to 8 GB of RAM , but in fact mount older motherboards and have a high consumption compared to newer servers.

These servers should be replaced, and the best choice, to date, almost always is to use instances of cloud computing, perhaps provided by the same provider from whom you purchased the dedicated server. The substitution instances of cloud computing does not necessarily mean spending more, in fact, very often the server we are going to replace, being physical, are redundant with other machines, increasing the power consumption and cost: this need with the demands of cloud computing is not always necessary, since many vendors offer HAS base on virtual instances and the lack of having RAID or other common systems on the physical servers to increase the reliability of the system.

Matching Resources And Performance: Optimize Server Daemons

Your server does not necessarily need to be replicated in the cloud with the same resources, we have already said that the main problem that is encountered is the lack of service configurations within the server and the lack of a general optimization of the machine. This leads to a high consumption of resources, not justified.

What Are The Services That Most Affect Performance:

Webserver : Most have a view of the servers have an installation of Apache Web server, but this is not the best solution for all your needs. Apache has become one of the most popular, but nowadays there are better solutions such as Nginx and LiteSpeed, solutions that are configured for reception of high traffic loads.

Database : In this case we know that the problem is almost always MySQL. It is a database that does not scale quickly and which requires a configuration for ad-hoc environments which may vary according to the type of site. In these cases, our advice is to proceed first to identify what is the actual load on the DBMS, performing analysis using specific tools and proceed to the configuration file of MySQL: use successfully for some customers even Percona MySQL , tools that we repeatedly reviewed and for which there are several applications which are already ready for configurations.

The database is definitely one of the most delicate and critical for those involved to migrate its infrastructure with a performance optimization. At present we found that the greater improvement is achieved initially by an ad hoc configuration of machine and balancing resources properly if the machine takes care of serving only the DBMS, and going to provide a configuration tailored to the individual service installed, precisely with the help of a prior analysis of the problems. Very often the database is a “victim” of queries in poorly designed applications, a problem which can be solved easily without putting hand directly to the application code.

Load Testing And Performance Testing : Once a server is put together, the job is not done, we can even say that this is only the first step. What is needed is to see how does the server and its configuration under “stress”, going to simulate a load as usually we do in our reviews. This allows you to see if the work done during the configuration is correct, and especially how it responds to our server in the event of a high peak of requests: usually both hardware and software configurations must provide the level of “tolerance” that help the system administrator to exploit the resources for the management at the peaks.

The Christmas season is coming, the people around the world will start with the preparations, all the online stores will start offering discounts on their products online, registering the highest number of annual sales.

During this period, all owners of an online store, call for the audits required to prepare for Christmas period. This article will give some tips to be prepared to handle a larger number of orders, requests and demands within your own online business, it is obviously too late to hand updates to the code of your e-commerce, as well as to prohibit the possibility of changing critical components, which are not tested in this period.

Upgrading The Server And Your Web Hosting Plan

Depending on your e-commerce store which would be hosted on shared hosting or within a dedicated solution, it is useful to take some precautions:

Check your plan and upgrades: If we launch a promotion that can bring a greater number of visits, then it’s time to even think of expanding its shared hosting plan. In this case, we contact the provider to request a change to a higher priced plan, specifying the fact that it takes more resources for the website, and then the plan itself should be moved into a more powerful machine.

Troubleshooting the ISP: To find your main domain, website or e-commerce locked in the month of December is not a good news, we see that any faults with your ISP, from the perspective of technical and commercial, are resolved. Needless to require version upgrades or changes to the plan webhosting at this time, the only requirement may be a change and a server upgrade.

Upgrading your Dedicated Server:  If your e-commerce is hosted on a dedicated server, it would be useful to contact your service provider for the adjournment of the same. If they are not already the best performance, it is unthinkable to go to support an increase in visits. Increasing the RAM could be the necessary first step, followed by a reconfiguration and tuning your server, something we see in a few lines.

Cloud Computing Or Cloud Hosting: If we do not have the possibility to increase the resources of our area of shared hosting or on our dedicated server, then the best solution is to include the use of an instance of Cloud Computing effective only for the month of December, or at least only for the period in which we expect to be able to have a greater number of visits. In this case ESDS offers cloud computing solutions with pricing that it can be used for the required time.

You ignore the discourse of performance on the ISP side, it is important to understand if you (are) really ready to face an increase in visits with the configuration of server or instance of cloud computing. The first thing to do if we are not experts, is to contact your ISP or service ‘system to ask a tuning of the server.

What we need to verify exactly:

Apache : We are going to verify the configuration and memory consumption
Nginx : If we use this webserver, we just go to prepare a configuration tailored for our system, basic already get superior performance with Apache
MySQL : The use of tools to identify the problems of MySQL will save you a lot of time.

Finally, after working on our webserver, it is essential that an e-commerce website takes very little time for opening pages, first check which ones are current through one of the many online tools, we recommend PageSpeed Tool By Google.

Here we can get some information about our web site, an acceptable speed should never go more than 1.5 seconds to open, but we talk already about a very high result. To get further information, it is necessary to use Google Webmaster Tool, which gives an indication of how fast our site is, compared to all those tracked by Google.

Once you understand that the speed of the pages is not acceptable, there are several solutions that can be used. First we have to see if our e-commerce platform allows you to do caching, images in all statistical components. Solutions such as Magento or OsCommerce and have these options and you need to identify the best plugin and put it in production, but this is a change that could present problems so it should be applied at night, checking operation.

Optimizing your site must begin with the classic rules:

• Using verified HTML code, corrected at a syntactic level and setting
• Union and compression of JavaScript code for easier loading
• Loading the JS code at the bottom of each page
• CSS compression and compression of images with CSS Sprites

There are dozens of guides on the net. We will definitely prepare further test to check the speed of loading. We can think of to use the handy YSlow, which is a plugin for Firefox, or Chrome’s console directly. It will show the loading times of the individual components of the page.

Our Forum community is available for any further information. You can simply open a new topic!!

Monitoring-as-a-Service is an outsourced service to provide security mainly to platforms that are run on the Internet for conducting business. Maas became highly popular in the last decade. Since the advent of Cloud Computing, its popularity has increased even more. Safe monitoring involves protecting a company or other institution / organization from cyber threats, in which a team prepared is crucial to maintain the confidentiality, integrity and access to IT assets. However, time and resources constrain the limits of security operations and their effectiveness for the vast majority of companies. With this, it is vital to continue vigilance on security infrastructure and information.

Many regulations of various industry sectors that require organizations to monitor their environments, dedicated servers and other information, ensure the integrity of these systems. However, conducting an efficient process of monitoring can be a daunting task because it requires advanced technology, skilled security experts, and scalable processes, and none of it is cheap to acquire. The security monitoring services are offered today on Maas in real time, responding immediately to an incident via a secure infrastructure and protect assets and customer information. Until the advent of electronic security systems, the monitoring and the responses were performed with the capacities and human resources, depended strictly on human. The adoption of information technology security systems within the last two decades, and the ability to be connected to security operations centers (SOCs) via corporate networks, significantly changed this scenario.

There Are Two important points: (1) The total cost of ownership for traditional SOCs is much larger than a modern technology of SOC, and (2) Achieve low costs and security operations with a high efficiency which is equal to a modern architecture such as SOC that use IT to address safety and security risk.

Protection Against Internal And External Threats

Monitoring services and security operations centers can increase the effectiveness of security infrastructure to customers to actively analyze and alert logs from infrastructure and equipment based on real-time clock. Times tracking correlate information from multiple security equipment to provide analysis with data actually needed to eliminate false positives (an event held by an intrusion detection system and perceived as an attack but actually is not) and respond to real threats against the company. It is an important theme of the constitution skills and resources to maintain service level. The team responsible for information security can check the system performance on a recurring basis and update periodically and provide recommendations for improvements. Typical services provided by providers of Maas are described as:

Early Detection: Detects and reports when new vulnerabilities appear. Reports are sent to the responsible person designated by the customer, containing information and detailed descriptions of the vulnerabilities and affected platforms, as well as information and indications of possible impact of specific actions to be considered to minimize the effects of the vulnerability if you happen to know it.

Platform, Control And Monitoring Services: Platforms, controls and monitoring services are implemented as interface and make it possible to know the status of the platform operation monitored at any time. It is accessed from a web interface, remote access is possible. Each operating element is monitored and provides a status indicator and its critical impact within an account. Such diagnosis and determinations can re-establish new parameters. Upon detecting and identifying issues, preventions can be taken into account to prevent loss of service.

Intelligent Log Centralization And Analysis: It is a monitoring solution based mainly on correlation and affinity of log entries. Such analysis helps to establish an online Master of operating performance and provides a reliable index of threats. Alarms can arise in an event that sets new standards in online master. These type of sophisticated tools is are used by a team of experts for analysis of threats and security answers.

Vulnerability Detection And Management: It is an automatic verification and management levels of information security systems. Periodically, this service performs a series of automated tests in order to identify the weaknesses of the system that possibly are exposed on the Internet. The service also performs a follow-up task requested and sends reports to the implementation of a business continuity plan to increase security levels.

Continuous System Upgrade And Fortification: A secure posture needs to be in motion with continuous update and new systems and software applications. New packages, versions and updates are needed to maintain safety levels. This service is an ongoing effort to inform gaps and install systems with total security applications.

Intervention And Help Desk Services: A rapid response when a threat is detected is crucial to mitigate their effects. For this, you need a group of qualified engineers with extensive knowledge in various technologies and skills to support different applications as well as infrastructure in 24/7 basis. Maas platforms offer this type of service to their customers by providing a forensic analysis to determine what the problem is and how much effort it takes to fix it. This service includes assistance with bug reports, problem management, etc..

A majority of colocation providers will limit you to accessing the servers that you have hosted with them through Remote Desktop or SSH only and this can introduce issues for server administrators that require greater control of their server, such as the BIOS configuration. ESDS provides colocation solutions that offer KVMoIP access so that you have full control of your hardware from a remote location so that you don’t have to be present in the data center to perform tasks that require a greater level of access to the server. The issue with Remote Desktop and SSH access is that both of these services are reliant on several services being up on the server along with the server being booted into the operating system, whereas KVMoIP services run independently of the server so that you can control of your server as if you were controlling it directly.

Why is access to collocation equipment different to that of dedicated servers?

You are the owner of the equipment that you collocate with a web hosting provider, which means that you have every right to want full access to every aspect of your servers. Dedicated servers always remain the property of the web hosting company that you purchase them from because you are only leasing them, therefore meaning that web hosting companies rarely let dedicated server customers have any access to their dedicated server beyond SSH or Remote Desktop access to the operating system that the server is running. Collocation is recommended for businesses that are looking to develop servers with a custom configuration from the bare metal upwards.

Mount Local Devices on the Remote Server

Using KVMoIP you can mount devices that are local to you over the internet on your remote server, allowing the server to view and access hard drives and other devices as if they were connected directly to it. When managing a server remotely you may have reason to copy over files or other content that is located on the your desktop machine, but using other upload methods such as FTP that can prove to be unsecure may not represent the best option available; if your local hard drives are mounted remotely then accessing these files can be done in a more secure manner, whilst the transfer feeds are going to be far greater than any other protocols available for this purpose.

Independent Management

KVMoIP can offer server administrators a lot more independence with the management of their hardware because they will be able to perform a majority of operations that would otherwise need to be completed by on-site staff, remotely. If there ever comes a time when you need to reinstall the OS on your collocated server then this can be achieved through KVMoIP as you will be able to follow the process much in the same way as you would if you were installing an OS on a desktop computer; other tasks that can be completed in this manner include the rebooting of your hardware and the modification of BIOS settings.

KVMoIP vs. Remote Access

Remote access protocols such as SSH and Remote Desktop are ideal for situations where you only require access to the operating itself and these can be very fast and efficient ways in which a majority of server maintenance tasks can be completed. KVMoIP access grants users of a more technical background greater access to their own hardware so that advanced configuration changes can be made so that they can improve the performance of their servers. In either case you will be able to access your server using either Mac OSX or Microsoft Windows on your desktop computer – Remote Desktop isn’t available on Linux.

Support

If KVMoIP ever fails to meet your needs then our 24×7 support team are always on hand to provide you with assistance where necessary and can reboot your server for your manually as our NOC team are present at our data center around the clock. eMagic access is also provided so that you can manage your KVMoIP settings and view usage statistics for your collocated servers; eMagic also provides the facility to control the state of your server so that you can force your own reboots if necessary.

RAID Backups

A simple method that can be introduced to a dedicated server to increase the security of the data that you are hosting is RAID 1; this is a hard drive configuration that requires two physical disks, with the idea being that when you store data to one hard drive, it is automatically mirrored on the second hard drive so that if one of the pair fails, you can still run your server off the drive that is still available and you won’t lose any data. Failure of an entire RAID array is a very rare occurrence which is why we recommend this solution for anyone looking for a dedicated server that can offer data integrity; this is something that will need to be chosen during the order process because RAID can’t be integrated into your ESDS dedicated server once it has been provisioned.

Off-site Backups

A second line of defense is necessary to ensure that if your server does suffer data loss, you can still retrieve a copy of your data that can then be used to rebuild your dedicated server once it is bought back online. There are a number of ways in which you can create copies of the data that you wish to backup; more often than not it is only the data that you are hosting along with any specific configurations files that you should backup using such methods because these are the easiest to package and transfer automatically. If you were to create an image of an entire server and then copy this over to a backup site using methods such as SCP or FTP then this could take a long time.

Application Backup

There are many applications that you may be using as part of your day-to-day activities that can offer backup facilities, which can minimize the amount of work, that you have to do to keep your data safe. For example, web hosting control panels such as cPanel and Plesk can provide you with the facilities necessary to backup the web hosting accounts contained on your dedicated server to a remote location in just a few clicks. Such facilities can be a life saver as a web hosting provider because they allow for quick hosting account restoration if your server fails.

R1Soft Backup

ESDS offers R1Soft Backup as an option with our range of dedicated servers for the ultimate in data protection for business continuity. R1Soft is able to take a backup of your entire dedicated server by reading the disk at the lowest level possible; because the application is bypassing the operating system as a whole, it is able to detect individual vectors and back these up as necessary. When compared to traditional methods of backup that have to read every individual file on a server, R1Soft is able to achieve a lot more in a shorter period of time and without placing a high load on your dedicated server. Other benefits of choosing R1Soft for your backup needs include:

• You are able to configure your own data retention policies so that you can choose how long your backups are stored for – it is recommended that you take backups daily, but if the data stored on your servers is mission critical then more frequent backups (i.e. every hour or half-hour) can be setup
• R1Soft is designed to industry standards and can cope with backing up around 64TB of data from a single hard disk, meaning that it will be more than capable of keeping up with your data backup requirements
• A web interface is provided so that you can manage your backups and download files to restore from any of the backup points that match your retention policies.

ESDS believes that it is important to encourage our customers to take regular backups of their data so that if they do encounter hardware failure or data loss at any point, they will be able to recover their data so that their website can be bought back online in no time at all. If you are unsure about which backup system will be the most appropriate for you, then please contact the ESDS sales team as they can shed light on the best possible solution for your needs.

A dedicated server is a physical server that is formed of physical components that can be adjusted to provide servers of differing specifications, with low-specification dedicated servers being the least powerful and the most powerful dedicated servers being available in the form of high-specification hosting plans. Whereas virtual server hosting services such as VPS servers and cloud hosting VMs are aimed at businesses with restricted budgets, dedicated servers are designed for businesses with larger budgets as is evident with the price of most dedicated servers. Even though ESDS aims to offer affordable dedicated servers, this is within the context of larger businesses that are able to justify the cost and maximize the usage of the resources available.

The purpose of dedicated hosting is offer larger businesses an isolated environment in which applications requiring high levels of security and uptime can be hosted. ESDS believes in ensure that our dedicated hosting customers can secure their dedicated servers to a level that matches their customer expectations and industry standards; ways in which this can be achieved include:

• A hardware firewall can be used with a dedicated server to provide an additional layer of security outside of the software that you have in use on your server to offer security
• Providing a professional server management service that includes carrying out a number of security checks and application installations to ensure that your server is available to protect itself using all available defenses
• As you won’t be sharing your dedicated server with any other users, you can be guaranteed that you have full control of the security of your hosting environment.

ESDS provides a range of dedicated servers that can be adjusted to meet your requirements as you wish. As well as offering a choice of hardware options, you can opt for Windows or Linux as you wish so that you can make the most of the technologies that you are familiar with.

Dedicated Hosting Custom

ESDS believes in offering all of our customers value for money and this includes providing them with an opportunity to select additional features for their dedicated servers that they feel can be used to enhance their web hosting experience and the overall usefulness of a dedicated server for their day-to-day business activities. As dedicated servers are physical servers, it is fairly easy to change the hardware configuration at the time of ordering the server – it is simply a case of opening the server case and modifying the hardware arrangement; however, once your server has been bought online, the hardware can’t be modified without causing downtime because your server will need to be taken offline in order for the changes to take place.

The isolated nature of dedicated hosting puts you in a position that isn’t obtainable with other forms of web hosting; you won’t have to share a single aspect of your dedicated server with anyone else, therefore giving you full access to the hardware of your server to use as you wish. Creating a custom hosting environment is one of the best benefits of dedicated hosting and can be done in the following ways:

• As you have full root/administrator access, installing applications and services of your choice will allow you to add functionality to your web applications that may not be possible due to restrictions in place on shared hosting environments
• During the order process ESDS will allow you to specify the hardware that forms your server so that you have room to create extra capacity by purchasing additional resources such as a more powerful CPU or more RAM for your server
• ESDS’ professional support team can also implement advanced server configurations for you that make use of several dedicated servers; server mirroring can be used to enhance the redundancy of your hosting platform by utilizing a secondary dedicated server as backup in the event that the primary server fails, whilst load balancing can be introduced to delegate the load of your website across several servers to improve system stability.

As all dedicated servers from ESDS are fully managed, if there is something that you are looking to achieve with your dedicated server but feel that you lack server management skills then you should contact our support team who can then assist you as necessary.

As one of India’s largest web hosting companies, ESDS believes in offering high quality service that can be used to develop a custom solution for each of our dedicated hosting customers.

The provisioning of virtual machines and resources for these has been increased dramatically with the introduction of the eNlight cloud, therefore reducing the time that they a business will have to wait to add additional capacity to its IT infrastructure. eNlight users are provided with a web-based control panel through which they can control their entire cloud hosting experience; it is quite normal for a website to require extra resources as it grows and by choosing an eNlight virtual machine, a webmaster can order additional resources when they need them – these resources will be provisioned to the virtual machine immediately upon completion of the order, with no downtime to talk of.

The eNlight platform from ESDS works automatically to provide clients with the best level of service achievable. ESDS has a 24×7 support team that is available to assist you with your cloud hosting service at any time of the day, but all virtual machine and additional resource orders are taken care of by our automated billing and platform system so that you are allocated your order once you have completed the checkout process. ESDS also offers a range of private

eNlight is a form of shared (or public) cloud hosting, a term which means that you are sharing the cloud as a whole with other users. This provides benefits as it means that ESDS will provide you with full support, whilst you can choose between Windows and Linux OS templates for your virtual machines. Shared cloud hosting is an affordable solution and is a good point at which anyone seeking cloud hosting can begin. ESDS also provides a range of private cloud hosting products for businesses with complex requirements – dedicated servers can also be purchased if you are in need of a dedicated hardware solution.

Idle Resources

The issue with existing cloud server platforms is that users are often left with idle resources that they have had to pay before because they could only choose from a set of pre-defined cloud hosting plans, but they have absolutely no need for these resources. Idle resources are a waste of money for cloud clients and for web hosting companies they represent a lack of ability to meet customer’s needs in all respects.

With eNlight cloud hosting you can choose the specific resource allocations that you would like to begin with; as you are charged per unit, you will only be charged for the precise amount of resources that you have purchased and this will put you in a position where you are only paying for what you need. You can then increase the resources allocated to your virtual machines as the demand on your website increases and your virtual machines are put under a greater load so that you have full control over how your servers before and your expenditure at every stage. eNlight also has an auto-scaling feature built-in that you can use to automatically scale the resources of your virtual machines when they are suffering load spikes, doing so guarantees that your virtual machines will never crash due to lack of resources and you can put a cap on how much you are billed by using this method.

Cloud Server Management

The clustered nature of the cloud makes managing a cloud an easy task for server administrators because all aspects of a single cloud can be managed from a single interface. With the virtual machines in an eNlight cloud being distributed across multiple servers in the cloud in order to provide the highest level of performance obtainable, it is important for server administrators to be able to manage every server in the cloud from a single location to ensure that everything continues to be synchronized and work in harmony. eNlight cloud hosting represents an opportunity to reduce maintenance costs and this is recognized in the prices that we charge for resources with our cloud hosting services; ESDS believes in offering affordable web hosting to all users and eNlight allows us to achieve this in the cloud hosting sector.

As a client using eNlight from ESDS you will have full control over your virtual machines from the comfort of our billing system. Features of your VMs that you will be able to control include:

• If your virtual machines are stuck in a frozen state, you can start, stop and restart them so that access can then be gained once the SSH service is running again
• You can order additional resources for your virtual machines so that you can give them a performance boost if necessary.

New features are constantly being added to the eNlight cloud – we will soon be introducing the ability to setup a vLAN between multiple virtual machines so that we can introduce cloud-based load balancing.

Dedicated Hosting Price Comparison

Dedicated servers are often the most expensive form of web hosting provided by many web hosting companies, but the benefits of ESDS dedicated hosting often justify the benefits. ESDS provides a range of affordable dedicated servers that will cater for the needs of users and businesses at all levels, with custom configurations being available where complex requirements necessitate large hosting budgets.

Windows servers and Linux servers provide the ideal platform on which large web applications can be designed to service thousands of users as the resources of a dedicated server can accommodate large number of users at a single time without even beginning to show any strain. The price difference between Windows servers and Linux servers can be one of the deciding for some businesses; the open source nature of the Linux operating system lends it to being more popular during a time when budgets are being cut and companies are looking to save money wherever possible – Windows, however, is still in demand because of the enterprise-class applications offered by Microsoft for the platform.

The range of dedicated servers available from ESDS guarantees that there is a solution available for users of all levels and budgets. A low-power Intel Atom server is the most affordable dedicated solution offered by ESDS, but provides the perfect environment for users moving up from shared web hosting or VPS server hosting. At the other end of the scale ESDS offers dual quad-core Intel dedicated servers that pack a lot of power with 16GB of DDR3 RAM and two 300GB SAS disks; a server of this specification is designed for businesses that are looking to host web applications that receive thousands of visitors every month, with stability of their hosting platform being one of the key requirements for them.

The price that you see is the price you pay for your dedicated server with ESDS, as we don’t charge any setup fee. You will also be paying for the following benefits:

• Our dedicated servers are offered as fully managed so that you are able to contact our 24×7 support team when you require assistance with your server; as well as rectifying any issues that you may be facing, our support team can also aid with the installation of applications on your dedicated server
• Your dedicated server will be hosted in our state of the art Tier 3 data center located in Nashik, India; through the provisioning of multiple connections and power supplies, we have been able to design a high-availability data center that features no single points of failure, therefore allowing ESDS to offer a network uptime SLA of 99.95%.

Dedicated Hosting or Not

The choice of dedicated hosting or not is something that is going to be decided by exactly what you see as being necessary in a web hosting, with small businesses probably not facing the demand that would allow them to exploit the features offered by a dedicated to their full potential. A cloud hosting service such as eNlight can offer a similar experience to dedicated server hosting with regards to the hosting environment that is offered, but not everyone will be satisfied with the lack of physical hardware configuration changes that can be made even though the resource allocations of an eNlight virtual machine can be altered as required.

The main negative factor surrounding dedicated hosting for many parties is the price that they have to pay for a dedicated server; however, with low-end dedicated servers offering performance that is akin to or lower than that offered by a VPS server, opting for a cheaper virtual hosting solution will provide you with a greater selection of performance benefits. The more expensive dedicated servers offered by ESDS provide resources so powerful that even a website which receives thousands of visitors a day probably won’t even begin to tax the power of the server.

If you are unsure of whether a dedicated server is going to be the most effective solution for you, contact ESDS as we will provide you with the advice that you need in order to make a decision. With a range of services on offer including shared hosting, cloud hosting and VPS hosting, ESDS will be able to point you towards the hosting plan that will offer you the environment and features necessary for your website.

In 2012 the bandwidth used worldwide is worth growing, because users who access the Web are growing in number and data center service providers, as well as ISPs providing connections to homes and businesses are faced with an ever increasing demand for bandwidth output from their servers.

The bandwidth, which we will cover in this article as a monthly traffic, is surely one of the parameters of interest when one talks of a webhosting solution. Whether it’s a shared hosting solution or a dedicated server, your ISP gives value to bandwidth, which indicates the speed at which our website may provide content to the outside users, and a value of traffic per month , Instead it indicates how many gigabytes does our site use every month. These two values are in fact relevant, in fact if we multiply the bandwidth available to us for the month of use we get exactly the maximum monthly traffic that we use for our web site.

Many customers, when choosing a solution for a new web site, or already launched website, find it difficult to estimate how much bandwidth is needed for their site, and therefore rely on solutions that are often not suitable. In this article we see, briefly, how you can get an idea of bandwidth consumption and how to predict the increase in the short term.

The traffic monitoring carried out by our web site is crucial for several reasons. The most obvious is that many hosting solutions charge the cost as per additional GB over the threshold limit. If our plan includes 20 GB of monthly traffic, and the use is 25 GB in a month, then we will have to pay extra amount to the provider in excess of that 5 GB bandwidth.

The same applies to the VPS and dedicated solutions where the charging is often even   more stringent. Monitoring of the traffic allows us to understand the days with more visits and requests from users, and may be the wake-up call to see if the traffic generated is not entirely “normal“, but produced from attacks on our web site (DDOS Attack) or by search engine bots or other organizations that require our pages all the time.

The speed will change significantly if the bandwidth is completely used: In this case, the provider does not provide us with tools to understand how much bandwidth we are using in real time, except in the case of dedicated servers and VPS. Many shared hosting accounts have such a dedicated bandwidth of 512 kbit / s or 1 Mbit / s, while other vendors prefer not to expose this value.

As previously mentioned, the value of bandwidth is a parameter connected to the monthly traffic, however, it has a greater importance in some cases because it allows to understand exactly how many visitors we can accommodate simultaneously online, with a continuous request for content from our account or server. Take, for example to the streaming services, or to services providing multimedia content, in this case it is essential to have a value guaranteed bandwidth.

If our website is already online, the first thing to do is have an idea of the current consumption that we are producing. In this case we take a look at the statistics of the web server, and more importantly, we cannot use tools like Google Analytics, which do not provide information about the use of bandwidth.

Two tools that we can take into account are AWStats and Webalizer. These two statistics software are installed by almost all hosting providers which allow you to check the bandwidth usage on a monthly, daily and even hourly basis.

Many hosting providers, especially in the case of dedicated servers and VPS, from their control panels provide the ability to monitor the traffic used to be able to get an idea of monthly consumption. The control panels such as Plesk and cPanel provide the ability to monitor the bandwidth usage per web site, on a monthly basis. Once we have a clear idea of the consumption of our website we can certainly provide the best future growth even and especially to move towards a web hosting solution that can guarantee the traffic without any problem.

Now that we have seen that we can use statistics to get an idea of the consumption of our web site, the question is trivial, as we do in the event of a new website. First we must understand what we talk about in detail: a website that was launched with much content online without any promotion on dedicated channels, it is hard to see thousands of visitors on the website daily.

Unfortunately in this case we do not have technical data: Study the impact of an online site meets several qualitative questions. If we plan an advertising campaign on multiple channels, we can now estimate a high number of visits (proportional to the number of channels and the channels chosen for ad), and if our web site relies solely on organic traffic and search engine traffic, we cannot get 2000 daily visits.

We can try to understand the consumer as well for visits: It is easy to “measure” the content. First we make our web pages and do an average of their weight. Today, a page can easily get a weight of 400/500 Kb: we know that in this case if you open it 10 times, we used 4 MB of traffic, if they are opened 100 times, 40 MB is used and so on.

With an estimate of the traffic generated from our website, on a given day, we must consider a number of additional variables: the majority of websites have days during the week where the traffic is higher, these are usually working days, but this pattern may change depending on the website. Like, the night of the Web sites are those where less traffic ever recorded. Once our website has been online for a few weeks we will have a clearer idea of the days with higher consumption and hours in which there is a spike in visits.

If we talk about solutions such as VPS and dedicated servers, then it is evident that the monthly traffic and bandwidth are values that need to be taken into strong consideration: providers set limits in terms of guaranteed bandwidth, such as 10 Mbit / s, and in terms of band burst, ie the quantity of excess bandwidth that can be used for a limited period of time.

If our server has dedicated 10 Mbit / s guaranteed bandwidth and 15 Mbit / s burst of bandwidth, means that for a certain period of time in the day we get to use the value of 15 Mbit / s.

Currently there are dedicated servers and VPS packages which are activated with flat rate, where they also have several terabytes of traffic including: in this case it is useful to understand what is the guaranteed minimum speed for use thereof.

In the case of shared hosting solutions: Nowadays many hosting providers do nothing but place the value of “unlimited” bandwidth that can be delivered out, a practice that may mislead customers as unlimited resources do not exist. This choice is due to the fact that most shared hosting customers have an average consumption of the infrastructure of the hosting provider. This does not mean that our web site can really accommodate millions of visitors, usually the contract of service raises this issue clearly and frees the provider from liability for the suspension of the service if excessive traffic is carried.

Cloud… The name recalls the images of a shadowy fog that is always out of reach. The reality of cloud computing can only seem mysterious. Before entering into this nebulous border in IT, it is important to separate the hype from reality.

In assessing these assumptions related to the cloud, researchers focused specifically on public clouds and made a simple question: Fact or Fiction?

Fiction – But Maybe Not For Long

While migration to the cloud is not yet universal, there is no doubt that it is a wonderful trend that will only grow with increase of its adoption and importance. According to a 2011 survey of Advanced Micro Devices, approximately 37% of companies are already using cloud. And 24% of respondents to the survey in 2011, among data center managers, retailers and engineers, said they have plans to follow or implement a cloud computing in the next 18 months. According to a recent IDC report, worldwide revenue from IT services in public clouds exceeded $ 21.5 billion in 2010 and projected to reach $ 72.9 billion in 2015.

Regardless of which one is more accurate, it is clear that the cloud market is growing – and is much higher than suggested the news a year ago.

Why The Problems And Delays?

Although providers have improved data security and privacy considerably since the beginning, persistent concerns over access to proprietary data, location and transfer continue to limit distributed adoption. The flexibility of the system in general is another concern with public clouds. Additionally, blackouts in various cloud providers are probably reason enough to discourage some businesses that depend on the availability of fixed network for survival.

Switching To Cloud Means That You No Longer Have To Worry About Downtime..

Fiction  

If your company switches to an external cloud provider, the risk of a blackout is simply transferred to their data center provider. The only change is the control. In its own data center, you control the infrastructure and availability of your network and data. This control, of course, brings many problems of ownership and responsibility with it that may have been a factor in the shift to cloud first. The control means responsibility, and the burden of responsibility for ensuring network availability is something that some IT managers prefer not to be responsible.

If your organization chooses private cloud, you can gain a measure of fault protection for a single server, but the damage caused by a total blackout in the data center continues to be destructive. To maintain a robust infrastructure, power and cooling, it is critical to support a private cloud infrastructure. The management and monitoring of data center becomes even more critical.

Finally, it is important to remember that simply switching to cloud does not eliminate the concern about downtime or damage that may cause a blackout to your business. Customers remember the  network failure – not the fact that the failure was the fault of your cloud provider.

Cloud Computing Solutions Always Reduces Costs And Workload

Fiction

This is a common argument for the adoption of cloud, but depending on the applications you plan to support with the cloud, this may or may not be true. At least in the short term, it is likely that a transition to cloud is very laborious.

Businesses that switch to this type of work do so to meet a specific need and leverage resources previously unavailable (especially dedicated servers) that, through the cloud, are available on demand.

But cloud services adapted to the specific needs of your business require a transfer of culture that can be difficult to manage. Even when the setting is appropriate, classifying what can and can not be changed for cloud is a process that takes time. The increased operational efficiency can be light at the end of the tunnel, but it is a short tunnel.

In terms of costs, cloud customers save money only when performing on specific cloud platforms. On the other hand, the report says that maintaining a private data center continues to have the best cost benefit.