Archive for the 'Managed Dedicated Servers' Category

Dedicated Servers Advantage

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Another advantage of dedicated server hosting is performance and how well a website can serve their visitors or their own customers. A business that utilizes dedicated server hosting does not need to spend time worrying that their site will be offline. At times the amount of uptime can be less than a person would like if they have shared web hosting services. This is typically not something one has to worry about very much with dedicated server hosting. Websites also will usually load faster when they are hosted on a dedicated server. This is due to the fact that there is not an overload of websites being hosted by one server. The server is not taxed by too much traffic, data and applications.

The fact that a website owner does not need to concern themselves with the worry of slow to load pages or excessive downtime is especially important for a business website. In this way dedicated server hosting provides a great advantage to businesses that utilize this form of hosting. The quicker a business page is to load and the less it is offline, the more likely the website is to be successful. If the page was offline a great deal or had problems loading a business could lose customers. This is not going to happen often with dedicated server hosting.

Although dedicated server hosting is a more expensive option than shared hosting, there are many advantages to the use of a dedicated server. Dedicated servers can be an especially good option for business websites. This form of hosting will typically provide the highest level of performance and security.

Managed Dedicated Server Hosting

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

For the nonprofit organization that wants to get out information about its services or its mission, managed dedicated server web hosting is very important. They will be looking for a means of telling how many visitors come to the website in addition to the services mentioned previously. A church, for instance, wants information about its worship services to be posted, and an invitation to visitors that will make them feel welcome. The number of “hits” at the site, as well as the numbers of visitors that show up on Sunday, can measure the effectiveness of their postings. A chamber of commerce or a city will want to invite visitors to see the area’s landmarks and attend local special functions through their web presence.

Because it has become such a coveted service, many companies are offering managed dedicated server hosting. As with any business decision, consumers need to be cautious and exercise wisdom when choosing a dedicated server hosting company. There are sites on the Internet where business managers can read evaluations of various providers of managed dedicated server web hosting services. These reviews can be an excellent first place to look. The word of friends or business acquaintances who have had good experiences with various hosts will be helpful as well. Finally, the old standby, the Better Business Bureau will provide any negative reports that have been made about the company under consideration. “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and gold.

Any business can expand their customer base through the use of managed dedicated server web hosting. No matter how good the product or service offered is, it won’t sell without advertisement. There are a lot of means for advertising at your disposal, but a website is probably the most efficient of all in thiss day of the Internet.

The new industry standard is for 24/7 availability. Managers seeking a host company should settle for nothing less. Another feature to consider is the availability of an auto installer. Auto installers will save time when installing a forum, image gallery, or content management system. Depending on where the company is in their website development process, they may need to determine and register a domain name. Name recognition plays such an important role in marketing a business, so protecting the website name is an important service the managed dedicated hosting provider should offer. Again, investigate the pricing options of this service. Often, a discount is provided if the domain name is registered for several years at at time, as opposed to on an annual basis.

Windows Web Server 2003

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Windows Server 2003 is a scaled family of web server editions that attempt at delivering Microsoft’s long-promised and long-awaited mature operating system. This may mean that Microsoft (finally) has a server that can handle the enormous loads of a major enterprise, or that it has a reasonably priced server that can be easily managed by the limited resources of a smaller company.

With this release Microsoft has certainly met a very high standard in the big four criteria: security, reliability, scalability, and performance. In addition, for some organizations Microsoft getting it right means having the correct special features. It also means competing with an industry-leading ease of use and the right pricing.

To meet these requirements, Windows Server 2003 is delivered in several editions, Web, Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter, that have different capacities and price tags.

Along with the Windows dedicated Server 2003 Microsoft also created the .NET framework for application development. Programmers will discover that this server, along with its built-in application server elements and the revamped Web server, are a particularly effective environment for .NET applications. Provided, of course, that Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is the development tool of choice.

Being an evolution of NT & Win2K, Windows 2003 has retained most of the stable features of the previous two editions & is miles ahead of them in terms of reliability, stability & features. However it is still not in the same league as FreeBSD or NetBSD when it comes to mission critical applications. With a wide range of development tools & addons available for the Windows platform, Win 2003 is still one of the ‘easier’ OSs to deploy and use. But when it comes to price-tags, it is probably the most expensive server OS system available.

Windows 2000 Server

Friday, July 25th, 2008

An operating system that underwent continuous evolution, Windows 2000 Server was neither perfect nor the best OS you could implement on your server. But with the familiar user friendly interface of Windows & the easy to use ‘Wizard’s to accomplish most tasks, it has pushed the envelope of competition with Unix (and now Linux) as the OS for the enterprise.

The Windows 2000, based on the NT platform was a improvement over the latter. Faster, more resource efficient & stable than NT, it had been reorganized and rationalized. The highlight of Win2K was the Active Directory system. An operating system directory service provides the means to record and organize the resources of a network (people, computers,and peripherals), control their security, and monitor their operation. This information becomes much more accessible in Active Directory and is used throughout the operating system. It is also required for features such as Kerberos authentication.

Windows 2000 Server bundled the IIS dedicated server into the package. It was faster, more robust than before. Also part of the Internet/intranet package is support for multimedia, including Windows Multimedia Services, Windows Quality of Service (to ensure that streaming multimedia receives necessary bandwidth), Resource Reservation Protocol, and asynchronous transfer mode support.

There were many performance enhancements in Windows 2000 Server. A good deal of code optimizing was also done resulting in an improvement of 10% to 20% over NT. There were four service packs released for Win2K which addressed a number of security, stability & other issues that were encountered.

With the release of Windows Server 2003 earlier this year and after nearly four years in the marketplace, Microsoft has announced that Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Window 2000 Server Client Access Licenses (CALs) will be retired in phases. Customers who are in need of a copy of Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server can obtain a copy of Windows Server 2003 and exercise their downgrade rights.

Windows NT Server 4.0

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 was a high-end operating system with a bundled dedicated server. It was one of the leading operating systems in the Internet and intranet worlds. Part of the reason for this popularity was Microsoft’s skill in positioning Windows NT Server as a useful corporate solution, with a slew of valuable tools and the ability to standardize.

Windows NT Server 4.0 was both a development and deployment platform. The other part of the equation was that overall, Windows NT Server 4.0 works pretty well as an Internet platform, especially on a small-scale or departmental intranet level.

Most of Microsoft’s claims regarding Windows NT as a dedicated server were related directly to Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0, which was bundled as part of the operating system. IIS was integrated with Windows NT Directory Services, making it easier to develop and integrate Web-based applications. IIS also integrated with other Microsoft tools: FrontPage, Microsoft Transaction Server, Microsoft Message Queue, Visual InterDev, various back-end tools, and Site Server.

But NT was not an OS for running mission critical servers. It lacked the stability and reliability of many of the Unix or Linux flavors. Though it did not dominate the server OS market, it did offer a option other than the Linux / Unix platforms. Over the years, 6 service packs were released , along with numerous patches and fixes to address the reliability problems.

The OS has been officially retired by Microsoft & effective January 1, 2005, Premier, pay-per-incident and security update support will no longer be available for Windows NT Server 4.0 (Standard, Enterprise Edition, and Terminal Server Edition).