Kaiser Webs Solution Blog

Web Design, Web Hosting, SEO and Online Business

The Overview

Expressed in percentile, downtime refers to the condition when a server is down or unavailable. The opposite of uptime. A downtime is usually an indicator that something in the server or the system went wrong or crashed.

Scheduled and Unscheduled Downtime

As the name says, a scheduled downtime is an announced downtime that is aimed at maintenance. Nobody will be surprised when the system or server shuts down. This is also good because it shows that the providers understand what the customers need and are trying to improve the system.

An unscheduled downtime is unannounced and can happen anytime, which can be a cause for concern. This usually happens when a network or a software in the infrastructure fails or crashes.

A leading candidate for unscheduled downtime would be a software failure. It is usually the operating system or one of the applications.

Effects of Downtime on E-commerce

The severe impact is usually felt by businesses that have dedicated e-commerce. This impact will be felt both directly and indirectly. A website is important not only for direct sales but to other services as well such as product launches, customer service and after sales. Looses have been pegged by experts to be at around $1000 an hour. Imagine that! But there are damages worse than this which cannot immediately be felt because it is indirect but will slowly reveal itself in time.

Downtime Monitoring System

Out of 100%, most providers assure of a 99% uptime guarantee, leaving a 1% chance for a downtime. Not bad, right? Well, it depends. If you translate the 1% into the number of hours in a year, it represents 7.2 hours of downtime. Remember, this 1% only refers to server downtime and not the entire system which is an entirely different story.

If your company does online business, it would be best to transfer it in-house. A drawback would probably be the cost as this might be a tad too expensive to swallow.

A good thing to have is a monitoring system that will track your downtime. Usually third party, they make sure that your site is running optimal and that you are getting the best value for your money. Another advantage from this would be the trust and confidence that you gain from your customers when you place the monitoring system’s link in your site. It will show the customers that you are serious about quality and service and we know that that is what they want.

This is an arrangement where an account is bought in bulk by a third party or otherwise called the web host reseller from a principal web host provider. The web host reseller then resells the alloted hard disk space to customers in an attempt to gain profit.

Going further ahead, this is a form of business wherein an account which is usually a product or a service is bought by a reseller from another company, repackaged with more added value and then sold to other companies under the reseller’s account. The adding of more value to the product is a way of enticing the potential customers to purchase from the reseller rather than buying from the pricipal company. These added value are usually extras in the form of website designs, technical support or maintenance.

Web design firms, web developers or a systems integrators are companies or people who usually double as a web host reseller. Apart from the services they render, the hosting becomes an added value for their company. Without requiring too much technical knowhow, web host reselling is one of the better ways to start a web hosting company.

The reseller can basically focus on business as the technical stuff such as the maintenance of the infrastructure is taken care of by the datacenter operator while configurations, upgrades and server security are the responsibility of the dedicated server owner. Resellers are even able to look less like a reseller since they are capable of customizing control panels and name servers.

Before you start with your own blog or website, whether you use a registered domain or a third party domain – the next step that you need to do is choose the best blog hosting package to go with your requirements.

You need to decide on what type of package should you choose from web hosting package. There are three main choices that you can make your mind up. Though, there are other few choices out there but we will focus to the main choices.

Free Web Hosting. If you tend to blog alone for fun or just putting websites together as part of your hobbies or yet for a charitable cause where maintaining costs very low are essential, well then this is a good choice that will work for you possibly. Though there are hitches of free blog hosting, to mention; you will most likely have to live with the adverts of your host on your blog or website. Also, you will be sharing with so many other people and brawling for inadequate resources. You could also experience so many down times and the technical support is legally responsible to be fictional. The domain name of your host will also form part of your domain name, e.g.yourdomain.hostname.com. But as long as none of these hitches matter to you then free hosting is a good choice for you.
Shared Web Hosting. This is common for forum hosting these days. Where it is the cheapest among the two options which you can use dedicated domain and you can have your own email address to your domain name for example: ‘yourname@yourdomain.com’. However in shared web hosting you will not have your own server because you will be sharing a server with other domains, for this reason this choice has been referred to as being cheaper to some extent. Generally speaking this is a good choice for several people because it is very reasonably priced with choices for different hosting packages varying from single domain to reseller web hosting. So for your convenience, you must select the right hosting company so you will have a trouble free and well-supported hosting expediently.

Dedicated Web Hosting. At this choice, you will be paying the most for, but as a matter of fact if your site is all about multimedia with heavy data driven requirements or maybe you are into big eCommerce then you do not need this choice. As the name suggests, this choice means you will have your own server and no sharing with other domains, but you will definitely enjoy the singleness of this web hosting package over other packages as you pay for the privilege.

The web host, also known as an ISP (Internet Service Provider), lease out their servers for companies to rent. ISP’s give several services to companies like renting out hard disk space as well as maintaining the hardware and the like. Completed websites are uploaded into a server. The ISP in turn, are the ones who allow the users to view the pages through web addresses or domain names. As soon as a certain web address or domain name is typed by a user, that request is sent to the server to retrieve and send back to the user.

These web hosts use a software fondly called the server software. Currently, the most popular of these server softwares is the Apache software which has over 60% of the web hosts using it. This software is responsible for accessing the files and sending it back to the user upon request. It is also powerful enough to accommodate as much as a million requests a day with no problems.

It is very common for these web hosting companies to have a many as a hundred of these servers. When all of these servers are located in the same location, they are then collectively called a datacenter. This room or building where the servers are kept is where all the maintenance and support is given to these servers to ensure optimum running as well as less downtime

There are three levels in web hosting which are differentiated depending on the needs and budget of the client. You can rent a whole server just to yourself or share a server with others to save on money. You may also decide to just buy the server and just pay for the maintenance and connection fees.

Shared Hosting (Virtual Hosting) – Of the three choices, this is the most affordable. This is the most common of the three as well as over 95% of websites use this method. Depending on the speed of the ISP, a typical shared host can accommodate up to a thousand sites with no problems whatsoever.

Dedicated Server (Managed Hosting) – This is when a company decides to rent a whole server just for themselves. Although the company uses the server alone, they still do not own it and are still liable to pay rent fees aside from the maintenance.

Server Co-location – This is the last level where a company decides to purchase their own server. The term means basically having the server co-located together with other servers in a datacenter. The company then pays for the connection and the maintenance of the server.

For hosts looking towards Cheap Reseller Hosting, your search ends at Host Nexus. This company offers lucrative business opportunities and can help you in being a Web Hosting provider to other webmasters. It is reputed and can aid you in providing great services to your client with minimum effort on a daily basis.

There are certain critical features that have made Host Nexus to be at a position, on which it is, at this moment:

Bandwidth

They offer considerable bandwidth when you compared their services to others offering reseller hosting. At a minimal fee, you can use up to 45 GB of bandwidth.

Memory Usage

Similar to other top resellers, Host Nexus offers more than enough space at an affordable rate to a large count of clients, irrespective of what is there on the websites. You can get up to 7 GB of memory at a meager pay on Host Nexus.

Customer Service

This is what makes Host Nexus far better than other resellers on the web. They have a lively customer care service agents, who are always on the move in replying to the queries of a client and getting their issues resolved in very little time.

Host Nexus can be your ticket to getting an excellent passive income. So, what are you waiting for? Cheap reseller hosting services are only a click away.

Bandwidth is very important to a webmaster as this is the measurement of data from a website’s server all the way to the visitor’s computer. The faster, the better. If you expect a lot of traffic or a lot of downloading from your site, then you should consider higher bandwidth. Oftentimes, webmasters forget to consider future requirements and thus, find themselves shutdown for failure to measure their expected bandwidth by choosing the right hosting plan for their site.

Bandwidth works just like water passing through pipes from the water company and getting to your home. The internet is also connected through a series of “pipes” or in this case, cables. These cables have a specific capacity for the amount of data that it can handle for a specific period of time. This dictates the speed that the information travels from point A to point B and vice versa. Going back to describing bandwidth like water pipes, you can’t send more water than what the pipes are built to accommodate. Same with the cables.

That is why it is important to consider the right amount of bandwidth needed by your website. This will determine how much data can be transferred from your server going to the user’s computer and back.

A scheduled downtime is a common event among among web hosting providers and is the type that is anticipated. This usually happens when there are scheduled maintenance to be done and since this is anticipated, customers won’t be surprised to find their site down. They will also appreciate the fact that the maintenance is aimed at improving the overall quality of the service that they are paying for.

An unscheduled downtime on the other hand can be a cause for concern as there are no prior announcements made. This usually happens when there are network failures within the infrastructure or serious software failure in the system.

Based on previous incidents, software failure is the leading culprit of an unscheduled downtime. It is usually caused by either the operating system or one or more of the applications crashing.

Web hosting providers usually offer a 99% uptime guarantee for their servers. It’s like indirectly saying that you should expect a 1% chance of downtime. To appreciate the percentile measure of reliability, we will translate this in the equivalent number of hours per year. Basically, the 1% chance of downtime translates into 7.2 hours of downtime a year. You think you can handle it? Also keep in mind that this 1% only refers to the server downtime and not the entire system.

Companies that do online business are advised to move their operations in-house. A major drawback to this though would be felt on the financial side as the infrastructure can cost a lot.

Having a couple of monitoring reports available for the downtime of their web host would probably be the next best thing to have. There are advantages to having a third party monitor your downtime. This will guarantee that your investment is money well-spent and that your business will be running smoothly. Also, by having their links placed on the site, it assures the customers of quality service.