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Friday, November 09, 2007

How do cheap hosting companies give you all that space and bandwidth?

We wondered that too. We have our own dedicated servers and wondered how hosting companies can give away so much bandwidth and storage space. We would be in the hole if we tried to do that.

I finally discovered an answer from someone I know who owns a large hosting company, Hostgator. In the blog area (not easily found by most casual visitors) Brent spells it out. First, they allow approximately 2,000 websites per server. At $400 per month to lease for a good dedicated server that allows a lot of websites! Next, most people use only a small portion of what they are granted, less than 200 megs for a very large non porn website. If you’re not hosting movies or bit torrent sites you rarely get above 200, PAontheweb.com is not even 200 megs!

The one thing they don’t tell you is they cut you off if you use too much in the way of system resources like CPU usage. If your site is pulling tons of resources you’ll be notified and then shut down if you don’t comply. You will also note that many of these companies (not all) add very large hard drives to their servers. This reduces the over all effectiveness of the CPU and other things like RAM. That is why there are so many complaints about cheap website hosts.

Let’s face it. You’ve got to run a streamlined server to keep your clients happy. In order to do that you (as a server admin) must stay on top of system resources being consumed. That’s one of the main differences between dedicated business hosting and inexpensive hosting like GoDaddy, Networksolutions etc. There are other differences like support and redundancy. For example, our servers are backed up automatically on a daily, weekly and monthly basis and there is never a fee to restore a website to one of those three options.

Besides all that our servers are RAID 10 SATA II minimum meaning they have many redundancies built in. This may be outdated information by the time you’re reading it. We’re continually upgrading servers to the next phase as soon as it becomes needed. For example, we’re already considering moving up to a Quad-Core 3210 Xeon (Kentfield). Keeping our clients on the best systems available is one of our greatest services.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

A better way to search the entire web

PAontheweb.com would like to introduce you to the latest way to search the web at LubyG.com. This is just the beginning. More relevant search results is the goal of Google and PAontheweb under the new name LubyG (making the web slicker). Google Labs has brought about Google Co-op a new interface that allows us to create unique searches using the best of Google technology and the best of Co-operative input. Unlike Site Flavored search from Google which is an automated system that learns over time, LubyG allows input from the user. Right now we’re only selecting a limited few to colaborate with us. Soon, we hope to open a second grand experiment that allows everyone to participate under LetUsBeYourGuide.com.

Try it and see if your results are more relevant. It searches not only Google but MSN, Yahoo, Ask and others for better results.