Isnt shared hosting dead already? In hosting conferences and forums this is a question we’ve heard all too often. But despite all the dire predictions in the past one decade, shared hosting is still alive and flourishing.

 
Every web host on earth has a shared hosting plan, and all website owners starts hosting with a shared space. It is a market that just cannot be ignored, and it is still the most competitive market.

 
What does it take to succeed in this market? There are companies which keep growing year after year, and there are companies which stop growing after they get about 10 servers. Here is a quick overview on what the winners do right, and thus ensure their brand keeps attracting new customers.

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Most of us might have come across instances where mails from our domain are marked as spam even though it is legitimate. This article describes few settings that can be implemented in order to decrease the chances of mails originating from your domain being marked as spam.

Spamming can be prevented to a great extend by using anti-spamming DNS records such as SPF, DomainKey and reverse DNS.

SPF :

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records helps to prevent spoofing of mails by verifying the sender’s IP address. SPF record allows domain owners to specify IP address from which mails will originate, so that receivers verifying the SPF records can reject messages from unauthorized sources before receiving the body of the message.

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Virtual Private Servers are the primary choice of customers who can’t afford to buy a Dedicated Server, at the same time need same amount of flexibility and control. This industry is facing a serious threat from Amazon and Windows Azure Cloud Platforms. This article is focused on running a VPS business which can compete with these cloud platforms.

A thorough understanding of the features that end customers looks for in these services and implementing them at much lower price tag is the key for running a successful VPS hosting services. Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. The key features of Azure are:

* 99.95% monthly availability

* Supports different OS and frameworks

* Instant deployment

* Instant Scaling of resources

* Pay only for the resources used

* Quality customer support

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud enables us to create a computing instance in Amazon’s network. The main highlights of these platform are:

* 99.95% availability

* Instant deployment and scalability of computing resources

* Web interface for managing firewall.

* Easy deployment using preconfigured images

* Custom configurations using custom images

* Pay for only the resources used

* Quality customer support

A normal deployment of a VPS server may take days with its regular routine of customer chating with the sales team, then another few days for the technician to set-up the server. Your website should provide the customers an option to create custom configurations, generate its cost and order it instantly. Providing predefined configurations and proper documentation of their pros and cons will also delight the customer. Once the customer has ordered the VPS, you should be able to deploy the server within hours.

Your plans should provide high availability. This can be implemented using high availability configurations like Xen Clusters. A lot of virtualization technologies offers high availability configurations.

Another factor is instant scaling or resources. The customer may be anticipating high traffic in in the next day and he may need to scale up the resource instantly.Scaling of computing resource can be done instantly in most virtualization technologies. An experienced support team can accomplish it in a few minutes. The only requirement is that you keep sufficient free resources in the hardware node. If the hardware node itself runs out of resources, you will need the DC technician to manually upgrade the resources. This can cause considerable downtime for server.

A web interface which allows the customer to login and perform tasks like viewing resource usage of his server, ordering new resources or servers etc will be an added advantage. The billing portal used by most hosting providers can be customized to implement these services unless you are using any third party applications like WHMCS.

Integrating a high availability configuration which provides instant scaling of resources coupled with quality customer support and competitive pricing will make the customer think twice before opting for Amazon or Azure.

The above is a very rough outline on Running VPS business competing amazon & azure , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Dipin.D works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in October 2010. He 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.

Days are gone when we needed a dedicated IP for each website with SSL!

With Server Name Indication(SNI) extension of the Transport Layer Security protocol, it is now possible to use authentic SSL certificates for sites hosted on shared IP addresses. If you are on a Linux hosted environment, you could very well reap the benefit of the feature right away. Read the rest of this entry »

IT experts, analysts, industry leaders and everyone around, talks about Cloud Computing today. Everyone admits that we need to include Cloud, in our existing system. But the question is how and what to use.

Which Cloud to use

You might know that there are two types of Cloud - Public and Private. A public cloud will be like the services of Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Salesforce, that will drive the costs down and relieve you of the burden of managing resources, but at a cost of losing control over them. Whereas a private cloud will be built using an enterprise’s own resources in the datacenter, and will reside within the enterprise’s firewall, and one will have to manage the whole resource while enjoying full control over them. Read the rest of this entry »

VPS hosting has made significant inroad into the web-hosting arena, and today dedicated servers are becoming less popular.

The technical challenges involved in maintaining a virtualized platform can be greatly simplified with the aid of powerful control panel software. There are many control panels designed to run with a VPS but one of the best in the list is the Solus Virtual Manager. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh dear, you knew him, just that you think of him only when you are in trouble… He mends, he fixes, he gets things put straight all the while..

Oh God! You got it wrong, its not God! It’s “The System Administrator” Read the rest of this entry »

Yet another time, Bobcares participates in HostingCon. August 8th to 10th at the San Diego Convention Center @California, Bobcares marks its presence of a decade.

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Bobcares now gives you the liberty to augment your customer support services with its dedicated technical support team. This dedicated team functions 24 / 7 and ensures the resolution of your customer’s issues anytime of the day or night.

You can interview, select and train our engineers in your line of business and have them provide technical support exclusively for your customers. This team can work independently or supplement other teams you may already have. Your customers will be assisted by this exclusive team of one or more engineers, according to your requirements. Read the rest of this entry »

Bobcares constantly strives to bring out customer friendly and transparent support plans that easily dissolves with business trends and requirements. The recently updated minute based version of phone support plans by Bobcares caters to Webhosts, ISPs & Data Centers of every magnitude.

Bobcares’ Phone support plans offer your customers 24 x 7 Tier 1 technical support. Be it in English, Spanish or German, our phone support engineers handle basic technical support functions (like email setup and troubleshooting, publishing websites, control panel functionality etc.) and can also be trained to answer sales/billing queries for your company. Read the rest of this entry »