Virtualization is no longer a niche market. It is now a pre-requisite for success in webhosting industry. Gartner’s server virtualization report of 2011 mentions a virtualization market penetration of 40% for x86 server work loads. A study by Tier1Research on Mass-Market Hosting for Winter 2011 showed that 60% of webhosts provide VPS solutions.These findings tally with the technology adoption trend we see here in Bobcares as well.

For someone entering the VPS hosting business, it is important to choose the right virtualization technology based on your market segment requirement, and cost considerations.

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Backups are alternative copies of your original data which can be used to restore the crucial files and folders, if it is lost due to any reason. Backing up data and protecting is the hardest and most important challenge on todays world. Accidental deletion, system failure, viruses, power spikes and other similar incidents are some of the reasons due to which data loss may occur. So everyone needs to keep a backup of their data in order to prevent any unfortunate consequences.

Remote backup is the best way to restore data the most effective way and it includes less human power, fewer mouse clicks and little time to restore data back. One can keep their backups as online backup or external hard disk backup. Each have its own advantages and disadvantages.

External hard drives allow users to save files from their computer on another separate hard drive. Online file backup is the process of storing the contents of your computer’s hard drive through the Internet using a third party online backup service. Online backup is a better solution for most consumers for several reasons.

1. Reliability

External hard drives have the same hardware failure issues that the internal hard drive in your computer has. They will eventually fail or crash and put the stored information at risk, whereas online backup services are not dependent on a single hard drive to store your information, which makes them infinitely more reliable.

2. Security

If your external hard drive is misplaced or stolen you immediately lose all the backup information that you have stored there. Online backup services, on the other hand, allow you to store your information remotely and securely on computer servers that are maintained by professionals. In fact, many major corporations use the same online file backup services that are available to consumers to store important business information because these services are so secure and professionally managed.

3. Storage capacity

Third, external hard drives have storage limitations. For example, if you purchase a 100 GB external hard drive it will be able to store 100 gigabytes of information before you need to either purchase an additional drive or delete some information from your existing one. The top-rated online backup services offer unlimited storage capacity for all your important files. You will never need to buy additional storage capacity or hardware and you will never need to choose which files you will keep and which you will delete based on how much storage space is available.

4. Cost

Finally, external hard drives are more expensive per gigabyte of storage than most online backup services. We recently analyzed the costs of both options and found that online backup services are about 50% cheaper per gigabyte than using external hard drives.

It is necessary to have alternative backups for your informations. As we discussed above, online backup mechanism is the best option to take a backup for your informations as it is reliable.

The above is a very rough outline on online backup , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Jaslin Jose works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. She joined Bobcares in 2011. She loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.

Blog edited by :

Appu Joseph Xavier works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves to watch movies in his free time.

Bobcares, the largest outsourced web hosting support & services provider, announced today that they are partnering with CloudLinux Inc. BobCares will support and recommend CloudLinux OS to their user-base as they believe that CloudLinux can deliver excellent products that will enhance server performance and improve hosting efficiency and stability.

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Hot on the heals of the Linux 64bit kernel exploit, Microsoft has announced a vulnerability in its ASP.Net framework on Server 2003 and 2008.

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Microsoft announced the general availability of the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 on August 25th (They released the beta in June in case you missed it). Like the SP for Server 2008R2, this SP also includes more than just bug fixes. For a list of features and functionality added via SP1, check out this link.

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Windows Azure was in the news again when Microsoft announced the “Windows Azure Platform Appliance” at their Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) on July 12th. It consists of pre-configured containers that hold between a hundred and a thousand servers running the Windows Azure platform. These containers will initially be housed at Dell’s, HP’s and Fujitsu’s datacenters. Microsoft is hoping that large enterprise customers, like eBay, will later host these containers at their own datacenters on site. But what is Windows Azure? and does it have anything to do with Webhosting?

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Ok, I lied. OpenDS will not help you put the elephant inside the fridge. But why did you want to put that poor creature there, in the first place? No, I’m not going to talk about elephants or fridges. Today, its all about the process of “putting”. From the very beginning in the history of computing, storing data has been a big question. If we look at the road-map, we can highlight the growth something like this:

• How to save data?
• How to save data efficiently so as lesser space is consumed?
• How to save data, so that it takes very less space, and can be retrieved fast?

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Now that you have been introduced to Webmin, let’s see what it takes to install Webmin and get started.

Where do I get the files/packages?

The latest RPM’s, .deb package and source files can be found at the following page:

http://www.webmin.com/download.html

Alternatively, you could download the selective package/version from Sourceforge.net:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/webadmin/files/

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RegMon is a Registry real-time monitoring utility that shows which applications are accessing your Registry, which are the keys accessed, and the Registry data that they are reading and writing. This utility takes you one step beyond what static Registry tools can do, by letting you see and understand how exactly the programs use the Registry. With static tools, you will be able to see what Registry values and keys are changed. But with Regmon, you can see how the values and keys are changed.

The Registry plays a key role in the configuration and control of Windows systems and is the repository for both system wide as well as per-user settings.

A high percentage of system and application crashes are usually a result of unstable registry data. When a system or a service faces issues in accessing various registry settings, it misbehaves by crashing, displaying a vague error message or even executing itself with limited functionality. As you know, it is virtually impossible for one to understand what registry keys or values are mis-configured, without understanding precisely how the crashing application accesses the registry.

A simple answer in this type of situation is REGMON, the tool provided by Sysinternals.

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Over the years, the structure of IIS has undergone several changes. IIS 7.0, which is the most recent edition of it, is quite different from IIS 6.0. However, though the code base has been completely rewritten, most of the concepts are still the same.

A marking difference that any newbie would note about IIS 7 is its modular structure. Let me take you across the basic architecture of IIS 7 through this article.

This will get you an idea about the following areas:

• Basic architecture of IIS 7
• New configuration structure of IIS 7 (Various configuration files and its uses)
• Modular structure of IIS 7
• HTTP Request Processing in IIS 7.0

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