July 1st, 2008
Getting a Dedicated IP for your website helps you to
1. Enable SSL Secure Sockets Layer on your website
2. For your Information before we explain in next point one should know that almost all service providers host tens-hundreds of websites on the same IP address.
3. Now incase you are using a shared IP to host your website and there is one another website out of the hundreds hosted on the same IP address [which is a normal scenario] on the same server of some other client which does something unacceptable or in violation of terms of any major search engine like Google or Yahoo then what you may do never ever you will get a top listing in these search engines. So be careful while choosing your service providers as many extra cheap service providers land up selling their services to mischievous elements and then in turn get their IP’s blacklisted thus hindering the chances of all those hosted on these shared IP’s to get listed in search engines. Many will disagree to what we write because they cannot offer this kind of product so for them Grapes are sour but believe us ones who get dedicated IP for their website have far far better chance of getting listed with priority ranking on major search engines.
Posted in Web Hosting India | No Comments »
July 1st, 2008
Before you go further please remember :1. We at Economicalhost.com are in this Business of Web hosting since 1998. We are a 10 year old hosting company in Delhi India serving Corporate like Sahara-One, Anand Group, Punjab Kesari, Lal Mahal Rice, Surya Group, Citibank, Bharti, Delhi Public School and THOUSANDS OF export and business houses.
2. We know of no other hosting company in Delhi which is as big as ours in terms of magnitude of business we do and servers we have in USA.
3. We serve much much more than 10000 Websites and RUN A SELF OWNED SERVER FARM IN USA FOR OUR WINDOWS SERVERS.
4. We are also Accredited Registrar for .IN domains.
5. We offer backend support to many many many flourishing upcoming hosting/marketing/advertising companies in Delhi.
6. We have 50+ Linux Servers in USA and 25+ SELF OWNED Windows Servers ON OUR OWN SERVER FARM IN USA.
:-> Let us elaborate how we are now offering much more advanced services then other shared hosting service providers in Delhi/India/USA/UK etc.
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Everyone claims big and better but for an innocent customer there is no yard stick to make comparison and they are taken for a ride by tall claims of a service provider or they get their websites hosted with freelancers or those novice companies which simply copy paste the matter on their website from the service providers page and claim big.
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How is our Shared hosting different and has gone 1 step ahead of others is being elaborated as follows :
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Over the years we realized that we were lacking on one aspect of hosting in case of Linux Servers ONLY and it was that even though our existing datacenters offered very high level managed hosting support but still the needed PROACTIVE support was not there.
Saying all this please bear in mind that here we are not belittling ourselves that we were bad all these years and now we have gone very good but we are trying to emphasize on one aspect that today business needs have grown and now clients look for top notch services with 0% error..
Stating this fact we always felt that proactive support was the need even though maybe needed once a year or so to the most and at times when someone tries to abuse server resources at odd hours.
To overcome this smallest of lacuna we were always trying to find a datacenter which can help us take care of that bit of needed PROACTIVE support, but our efforts were put down by the fact that all those datacenters offering proactive support were asking for double the monthly lease prices. We in our quest to find a combination of price and service could not succeed and finally succumbed to the truth that there is no short cut to spending money if one needs service at helm. Our existing datacenters though offered support some for free and some for a charge but needed PROACTIVE support was not there, which we finally availed from the current datacenter where we are hosting our all new customers and shifting the old customers. |
We finally chose a datacenter to host our server which was offering PROACTIVE support with a price tag which we term as REASONABLY EXPENSIVE and not exorbitant, something like Rs.20,000+[PLUS} per month per server. The difference was that a normal USA datacenter may offer a UNMANAGED/SEMI-MANAGED/MANAGED Dual Xeon server with RAID1 for Rs.6000-Rs.12500 per month but then the support at times is lacking, which one needs incase of an issue which cannot be handled remotely. With our current datacenter where we are leasing our servers our life has gone much easier as we found that by the time our monitoring service will send us a mail which is every 5 minutes their technicians would already be working on our servers to make them work with utmost security and reliability.Why datacenter offering PROACTIVE support is the need of the hour ?
We have found that even most of loyal customers who are there for years at times are willing to leave a hosting service provider if they have a single issue even once in a year terming it as a lack of services from the service provider. We have found people abusing support staff on trivial issues accusing them of incompetence and when on checking their history of issues we were surprised to find that in last 1-3 years they had only 1-2 smallest of admin issues and nothing more. These kind of customer are very difficult to retain for their belief in the myth that servers can never go wrong or a service provider is incompetent if there is a minute of downtime. If we do statistical analysis, 99.5% uptime means 0.5% downtime and 0.5% of 720 hours in a month comes to 3 hours and 36 minutes of downtime in a month. FOR THE SAKE OF INFORMATION WE HAVE GIVEN 99.5% OF UPTIME ON 99% OF OUR SERVERS AND NOT EVEN FALTERED 0.5% IN LAST ONE YEAR WHAT TO TALK ABOUT A MONTH BUT even then we are at times abused by some ill mannered customers. They believe servers are some satellites or man made space ships which will never go down. They don’t know that servers are nothing but better forms of their desktop PC’s which may have issues at times. [Please do not think I am comparing PC’s with servers but here I am trying to give a small example to make those customers understand that servers are no NASA ships or satellites but simple computers which are there everywhere around these days. Smallest of organizations are having servers in their office or going for their own Virtual/Dedicated servers for better security, uptime and convenience.]
Now to come back to the main point that why we found the need for a proactive solution was to avoid such happenings where this 0.5 % of downtime in a Year of issues can also be taken care of by someone in USA or for the reason that when we needed support for some issues there should be someone trying to help us for good and knows what is happening on our servers. Even those datacenters which offer managed services do not have proactive services so that there is no downtime. From our experience of the industry we have found that at times when service providers like us need assistance from the datacenter in USA and are already in distress find the datacenter turning their face away seeking excuse that senior staff members are not there managing their support desk during their night hours and our morning hours or that billing/accounts/sales/build department is closed as they work only during their morning hours.
Even with service providers who are big and have people managing their servers 24 hours in India one will find that till the time the staff members managing the server coordinates/wakes up his senior admin or director/owner/CEO to inform him that there is an issue lot of time is lost and Senior admins in USA managing the datacenter may have already called it a day or various departments are already closed.
Let me cut short the story and come to the point that due to shortage of manpower, our need to retain novice customer who does not understand what is a server or retain those who need not want any downtime we had no option but to look for a service provider who should be BIG / EXPERIENCED / KNOWLEDGEABLE / ABOVE ALL OFFER PROACTIVE SUPPORT/MONITORING and be working on our servers before we even know of that any thing is wrong. Our gamble got us the jackpot and now you and we can sleep knowing that there is someone taking care of our servers and even our staff members will not be waking up the CEO asking for help in odd hours as we have someone assuring us that we are in better hands.
Thus to conclude we can easily say that we now better off then even biggest of shared hosting provider in USA as we now not only have our support staff but a much bigger backend support then many others, to top it all we have taken MOST expensive DUAL XEON E5405 Quad Core (Harpertown) (8 cores total, 2.0GHZ per core) servers which money can buy from this datacenter with PROACTIVE support which although makes us spend a lot but ensures happiness for all our customers.
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July 1st, 2008
Question : First and foremost one should remember to ask a hosting provider as to how many websites they host per server.
Answer : Many companies offer cheap packages by hosting more websites on a server which optimally should be running per server. Although there is no fixed criteria or parameter as to how many websites should be hosted per server as a simple gamming website less than 20 MB even can use whole of server resources but such is not the scenario with normal business websites as they consume very less space and resources.
Shared Hosting Servers are more like Bus or Taxi, in order to have a better ride/experience one should check as to how many websites are hosted on a particular server. To the best of our understanding and experience one should not host more than 200 websites on a PIV Server and 600-700 Websites on a Dual Xeon Server with maximum 20-30 mysql database per server on PIV and 50-70 database on a Dual Xeon server to offer best of performance, whereas many web hosts offer mysql db indiscriminately and offer to sell everything unlimited which is a farce as they only try to befool customer by making claims to sell which is unattainable level of performance from a shared server.
One should know that a Server is nothing but a better form of a personal computer. In layman’s language it looks like your personal computer only but is a refined or upgraded version of a PC as it’s job is to serve pages. We try to explain this as most non technical guys who are simple businessman do not even know what is a server and how it looks. They live in their own myth that server is some sort of a super computer in some gizmo world. Please understand Server is an upgraded form of Personal computer which has its own limited resources so whom so ever says unlimited is doing nothing but trying to fool customers of their ignorance. |
Question. How many web hosting companies offer unlimited space or many offer GB’s of web space for extra ordinary low price.
Answer : A simple answer to this issue is that previously hard disks used to be of lesser size and now we have much bigger hard disks so one can offer more space but even then anything which comes for pitten’s has to have riders as no one is here to run others business. Any web hosting company which offer extra ordinary cheap space like for example one offers free database etc. than beware that the server performance will surely be compromised and one will see lot of downtimes.
Further many companies hide their interest in their Acceptable Usage Policies and Faq’s linked very discreetly on their website so please make sure that you read their acceptable usage policy and Faq’s. We know of couple of companies in India and USA which offer unlimited space or more space but then they put few clauses in their Faq’s and AUP’s. For example they only allow linked html and php/asp files only.
Now what significance this has can be explained from an example as follows.
Allowing linked html or asp/php files only means that any file which is not linked to each other and has no relevance to the website will not be allowed to be hosted and if this is the case then one does not need huge space or unlimited space as 90% of the business websites are hosted within 10 mb of space.
We can elaborate it with an example of few portals hosted by us like for example we host a real estate portal namely salepurchaserent.com which has hundreds of pages whereas it in total uses not more than 50 MB of space. Another portal hosted by us namely indiaetrade.com which has more than 1,00,000 files uses less than 1 GB of space. As mentioned above a normal website does not use more than 10-25 MB space so even a smallest of package any web hosting company offers is sufficient to serve your purpose.Question. : How many web hosts offer MSSQL Database for free.Answer : One has to be a real Son of a Gun to offer MSSQL database for free as it is a big cost.
How and with what ulterior motives many hosts try to make such offers is explained below :
1. Many hosts in order to save money host database on the same server where they host websites or run their web services. As it is a bad idea to run web services and database services on the same server at least in Windows Hosting Environment.
2. Many host offer very limited space like maximum 10 MB for database knowing that database consist of mdf and ldf files where in the ldf files keep on inflating for the reason that they contain transaction logs and thus they fill up very very fast. So if the client makes the web application which uses mssql database then one should beware of the fact that he is bound to pay more within the duration of his package which normally is one year as 10 MB is bound to get filled within no time.
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Question : How many host offer GB’s of space for Mail services.
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Answer : The normal way of doing this is by limiting the POP size of the mail server. Many hosting providers play a game that on one hand they offer very very generous space in GB’s for mails but then on the other hand limit the POP size to 10-20 MB or maybe 100 MB thus creating a need for the client to go for an upgraded package which maybe a good cost difference. Another way to do it is by the way of offering limited server resources where they will come down heavily on the clients website later on complaining that he is abusing server resources and that if he needs to use such resources then he will need to upgrade or pay extra. No hosting provider is here to pay for his clients success. It is either by hook or crook one has to take money from the customer for his usage. People out of their ignorance do not realize that they are being taken for a ride as they create an impression that the company which is selling little expensive is a cheater or an unscrupulous seller. Companies which are old as ours know for sure what to sell and at what price so that it does not bring blemish to the name of the company and thus able to offer best of services at most reasonable prices. Any service provider who is in any industry needs to maintain his hard earned goodwill which is generated from word of mouth by serving customer for over many years. To conclude please make sure that you are working with those providers who are old, experienced and competent.
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Question : How come many host offer 5-10 GB of space for like Rs.1000-Rs.1500 per annum.
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Answer : Here also the game is simple they make you pay for the space which you will never use as they will put a clause in their Policy or Faq’ that you cannot upload unlinked html files thus even if you have a need to upload few files for some backup purpose or some other need then you cannot do that and trust us 99% of the people will never ever reach 20 MB limit so what to talk about GB’s of space.
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Question : Many hosts claim big so how to check their credentials.
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Answer : The easiest way to do is by asking them about the big names they host and for how many years they are hosting them or other good names. Also what is the percentage of customer retention has to be checked by asking few names which are hosted by service provider over a period of 2-3 years.
Secondly one should not forget to ask as to how many servers they have and what are the number of websites they host per server. For example if they are selling a website for Rs.100-200 per annum to the reseller or bulk buyer and on the other hand they claim that they have a Xeon server than one needs to do little mathematics to come to the conclusion as to whether they are speaking truth or not.
Here is a simple way to do some logical calculation.
1. To lease a Xeon Server one needs to spend close to $350/Rs.14000 per month which will have a backup drive and at least RAID1.
2. On a Xeon Server one should host not more than 600 websites and if someone is selling the webspace for Rs.100-Rs.200 per annum per website then the total earning per server will be Rs.200 per annum x 600 websites = Rs.1,20,000 per annum where as the cost of the server will be Rs.14000 x 12 months = Rs.1,68000 per annum. So to break even one will need to host atleast 840 websites @ Rs.200 per website per annum. Thus to break even either one is overloading the server by hosting more websites as it should have thus for sure leading to poor services or one is lying that he has so many customers as many hosts in India lease servers and not able to use them optimally so in order to get their monthly rent out they sell it at whatever price. You can very well understand how one who is incurring losses will be able to survive or offer good services.
Please bear in mind that when one buys server it take some time to add websites/sell web space on it and to break even for a new entrant or even few old ones it may take many months and up to a year. On reaching the point of renewal the host finds that lot of his customers are not ready to renew due to the bad service it offered thus he is again in the same vicious circle of trying to find customers. At times many host buy another server after it gets full within couple of months for the fact that they are selling cheap but once the year is completed and they do not get renewals the issue crops in that none of the server is optimally used thus brining in more frustration to sell at whatever price but to get money to pay for rents.
So please make sure that do not get biased by the prices and few false claims made by some host, think twice and try to make some logical conclusions as to whether a hosting provider is old enough to withstand such issues and is it financially sound. Visiting one’s office can make you understand its financial standing for the fact that how many people work for the host and if one cannot make a physical visit then how many good names are hosted by the service provider and whether it has some other valid credentials.
3. One other way to check it is to find how many employees are their in an organization and how many they are able to retain from last many years.
Let us give you an example using ourselves as a yard stick using which you will be able to make some logical conclusions about a hosting provider.
1. We at Economicalhost.com run our own server farm in USA and thus hosts who offer cheap and claim to host 1000’s of websites should have at least their own server farm as else they will not be able to offer such cost effective services for long or are bound to close as unless you run your own infrastructure one cannot sustain for long with down to earth prices.
2. How many new server has the hosting provider taken in last one year and what is the magnitude of his addition of new servers in a year.
3. We have added 10 Server in last 1 month and out of them 7 servers are Dual Xeon Servers with RAID1 and 2 GB RAM and REST 3 are PIV Dual Core with 2 GB RAM and RAID1. We have no doubts to claim that this feat is extremely extremely difficult for any service provider in India to achieve. On monthly basis we add not less then 1-2 server but for the month of November 2007 we placed order for 10 new server which is something to feel pride about.
4. In the month of October we offered a Brand New Santro Car to one of our senior Employee for his personal usage. Almost 75% of our employees are 2-9 year old.
5. In last 1 year we have opened two new offices in Delhi. One at Patel Nagar and Second at Naraina. Both the offices are very very Prime commercial properties and located on the Naraina Ring road and main Patel Nagar Road.
6. We have started a new portal with the name IndiaeTrade.com . The cost of making this Portal has been more than 1 million as 15 people are working on it from last 9 months on the payroll plus we have used service of many outside service providers too.
7. In last one year we have participated in many outdoor advertising campaigns and exhibitions to promote our business among masses. Very soon we will start a unique service of offering free email ids to Delhites by way of offering 2 GB mail space for an email id as per the colony they live in and for college students as per the college they study in. One will have an option to choose from 150+ Colonies and close to 50 Delhi University Colleges at our website YourColony.in
More to come soon…… |
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