If you plan on using a fully managed dedicated server hosting plan, you’ll need to have a lot of faith in the hosting company, because they’re the ones who have to take care of business if something goes wrong. Therefore, it helps to know what kind of experience they have. You’ll be looking for service that’s available 24 hours per day, 365 days a year. Plus, you’ll want your answers fast.

This is where finding out what other customers have to say about them can pay off. Check out any testimonials, and look for any upset customers online. Pissed off customers have a tendency to make a lot of noise.

The bottom line with a fully managed solution is that you better read the SLA (Service Level Agreement) carefully, because most companies will only do what they contractually have to. Since the service is spelled out in such detail, take a second to read it. Otherwise, you might end up regretting your choice later.

The SLA is what will differentiate one company from other. Make sure to get as much service guaranteed in writing anytime you consider purchasing a fully managed solution.

Colocation server hosting is not for everyone. In simple terms, colocation server hosting means the customer is putting their equipment in the network provider’s data center. Generally the customer will manage their own equipment, and the colocation center will primarily be responsible for the electric and network reliability. They won’t monitor the customers equipment.

The main selling point of a company that offers colocation server hosting is their uptime guarantee and their redunancy in the case of network failure. The two areas that separate the men from the boys is the area of how many network backbones they’re connected to, and what happens in the event of an act of God, or a power failure. Companies that work closely with major telephone companies generally run high quality colocation server facilities. Make sure to get a list of current customers before signing up with anyone.

If you already own your equipment, colocation server hosting might be right for you. But make sure to find out what happens in the event of downtime, because you’ll be relying on someone else’s network exclusively.

“Topics of hard drive utilization, bandwidth usage and CPU capacity are all second nature to IT managers. However, the entire community of IT professionals is increasingly being asked to understand electricity because damaging power disturbances such as sags, swells and transients pose threats to critical infrastructure equipment,” said Jim Thompson, product line manager, Software and Meters, at Eaton. “The Power Xpert Server Solution is a single server that runs continuously to monitor the single most misunderstood component in data centers, server rooms or other IT facilities – the power.”

“The Power Xpert Server Solution measures, trends, analyzes and captures waveforms while serving Web pages. No matter if you are a PhD-level power quality engineer, or an IT system-level administrator, these instruments provide you with the level of information needed, in an easy-to-understand graphical user interface,” added Thompson.

The Power Xpert Server Solution is for those who are serious about their energy infrastructure. For more information: Power Xpert Server

If you’ve been shopping for web hosting lately, undoubtedly you’ve run into the term “VPS Hosting” already. VPS hosting stands for “Virtual Private Server” hosting.

A Virtual Private Server is similar to a dedicated server, except it’s “virtual”. You still receive “dedicated” resources that only you can access, but you do not have a physical server dedicated solely to your needs. For this reason, VPS is cheaper, but somewhat less desirable than a dedicated server.

For all intents and purposes, a VPS is sufficient for almost all but the most hardcore we applications. For normal hosting, it should be more than sufficient. You get a dedicated O/S, a dedicated IP Address, and everything you need to host your own websites, so the added affordability is worth consideration.

You probably won’t find a VPS with a guaranteed uptime of 100%, but you shouldn’t settle for much less. Reliability is the main consideration when it comes to going VPS or conventional.

Price versus reliability and the potential cost of downtime should be considered carefully before entering into a VPS agreement. I would also suggest you do not sign a long term contract for VPS hosting. You might want to leave in a hurry if you run into reliability issues.

The two plans are named the Dedicated X10 and Dedicated X20, and offer 100 and 200 gigabytes of disk space, respectively, two and four gigabytes of RAM, and two terabytes of bandwidth per month.

Dan Richfield, President of Easy CGI was excited about the new plans.

”Customers clearly want more server capability such as more disk storage and memory. We’ve always prided ourselves on being flexible about delivering what our customers want, ” he said.

Dedicated virtual private servers (VPS) are a unique hybrid offering. They are somewhere midway between shared web hosting services and dedicated hosting services. A VPS creates multiple, independent virtual servers, each with its’ own operating system and software, on a single, partitioned physical server. VPS customers enjoy the benefits of private hosting, but for less cost than having their own dedicated server.

The BladeCenter QS22 is powered by PowerXCell 8i processors. The chips are the latest built on the Cell microprocessor architecture, jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba to power demanding gaming applications. The processors in the QS22 are five times the speed of the original Cell processor and have 16 times more memory, IBM said.

The new blade runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the primary operating system and includes the open source development environment Eclipse. IBM has released an upgrade of its software development kit for Multicore Acceleration v3, which includes templates to help customers utilize the features of the QS22.

“The QS22 is a technological leap over the physical limitations of traditional processors that often dampen the ability of organizations to reach their goals,” said Jim Comfort, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “IBM has delivered on the promise of integrating HPC into the business world in a way that allows developers, clients and IT departments to ramp up quickly and get results without delay.”

The QS22 is coming in early June.

Tips on finding low cost web hosts

To find low cost web hosting, you can look almost everywhere. Just surf around the internet and check out different web hosting services. Since they’re all different, the prices will be different, as will the service levels, so some of these packages will have extremely low cost web hosting and some will cost a great bit more. It’s up to you to determine whether the features that are more costly are worth it, and if the company can be trusted to host your valuable website.

A useful web hosting is one that you like and which satisfies your needs. In reality, most low cost web hosting services are quite poor, and are merely scams designed to excite customers with low prices and grandiose promises.

Some of the first things to check when you look into any web host are reliability, speed, scalability and the support provided.

Reliability of a server mainly depends on the uptime of the host’s servers. If the reliability isn’t good, you can lose many valuable sales and visitors. The service should have backups in case of any failure in their system, to make sure the system will still work smoothly. All hosts will either run their own data centers, or they will be co-located in the data center of larger carriers. Ultimately, your dedicated server will only be reliable as the data center you’re hosted in.

Speed means how fast the web pages will load and how fast the server responds to command issued on your shell account. Some web hosting companies are woefully over-loaded and respond very slow, regardless of what the supposed server load really is.

Scalability is the capability to increase the resources at a later date but at a reasonable cost. Normal web hosting services should allow scalability. This is useful in cases when your website gets more popular and the current resources that you have are too puny to handle the load.

You should be able to increase your resources instantly, or close to it.

Support means just what it sounds like. When you need help on using the web hosting server, how responsive is the company in helping you? If they don’t resolve problems quickly, the service is not worth the price, no matter how low.

Keep this points in mind the next time you shop for low cost web hosting.

When you decide that price isn’t everything you generally come to the conclusion that a managed dedicate server solution is the best move to make. Frontpages Web Hosting Network recently announced their new Total Care Support solution, which points out the positives of a managed server.

Rob LaMear, President at Frontpages remarked, ‘‘Through the promise of a fully managed solution, Total Care Support provides the customer with the sense of security they require. Our hope is that by eliminating the need to worry, the customer can fully focus all resources on their core business and, thus, become more successful.”

The service offers monitoring to ensure your dedicated server stays up and running, whether you’re around to watch or not.

For more information: Frontpages Web Hosting.

Remember the adage, you get what you pay for.

When choosing a dedicated server, one thing matters most. That is stability. You do not want technical troubles with a dedicated server. You’ll spend countless hours having issues with websites that shouldn’t be giving you grief, all because you’ve made the wrong choice of servers and now you’re in hot water.

We have a saying here at the MostHost hosting blog: we hate exciting servers. There is no way you want the excitement of a server malfunctioning, freezing, hanging, or causing general troubles. That is excitement we can all live without.

We’ve been investigating several cheap dedicated servers lately and the results have not been good. We’ll expose some of the jokers in coming months.

Some servers are really cheap but are not dedicated. Dedicated servers assure that your website is up and running so that your visitors can readily access your website. That is one obvious reason to choose a dedicated server over a shared virtual host. Most web hosting companies offer tiered pricing to fit the needs of their clients.

Monthly costs can vary greatly from one webhosting company to the next. Be sure to use a dedicated server company that has a price you can afford because if your website isn’t making enough profit to pay for the hosting costs, you’ll need to pay for it out of your own pocket. The dependability of a dedicated server will help to stabilize your profits merely based on availability. If your website is always up and running, you can theoretically make sales and other profits all day and night.

Cheap servers do have some downsides. The cheaper the package, the more likely you are to run out of storage and/or bandwidth for your visitors. Web hosts may incur additional charges should you run out of bandwidth before the end of your billing period. Unless you want your website to be “offline” you’ll be required to pay extra.

An easy way to find a cheap and dedicated server is to find and compare at least 10 different hosting companies. After that make sure that the servers are dedicated, this can be easily found by testing some of the sites that use that server or ask some questions in forums related to webmaster tools. By asking other webmasters for their experience, finding a dedicated server could be very easy. Now after finding several dedicated servers, compare storage and bandwidth, make sure the ones you are comparing have the amount of storage and bandwidth that you need. Then compare the price. This way you can see the difference in price, bandwidth and storage between different servers.

Once you compare all the factors, you can make an informed decision about what dedicated hosting company to go with.