With the evolution of technology, those days are over. Cloud hosting is now affordable and available to companies large and small. Countless businesses are making the switch into the cloud, and for good reason.

Uptime that can’t be beat

One major difference between cloud hosting and shared hosting is the ability of cloud environments to offer 100% uptime. Regular shared hosting can only offer 99% uptime, at best.

How is this possible? Well, with cloud hosting your website is on hundreds of servers. If one of them happens to go down, another server will step in automatically. A server is always at the ready.

In contrast, shared hosting puts your website on one server. If it crashes, so does your site. There are no automatic backups in place to deal with potential problems or traffic surges.

Full scalability

In shared hosting, it’s common for another customer’s major traffic spike to affect the performance of your site.

With the cloud, this is not an issue. Big increases in web activity are dealt with dynamically and seamlessly. The cloud takes everything in stride. If more power is needed, the cloud automatically delivers, and then gears down when the rush is over.

Killer performance

Within a cloud hosting environment, you always know that your performance will be top-notch, even if you are running demanding applications and sophisticated programs. The cloud deploys quickly and accurately.

Shared hosting is notorious for its unreliability. It all depends on what else is going on and what other customers are doing. You can never be sure that your website will be performing as you want it to.

The way of the future

The cloud is the latest advancement in web hosting technology. If you’ve ever lost revenue because of your site going down, you know how detrimental a server crash can be. Cloud hosting makes this business nightmare thing of the past. Using enterprise level hardware from the biggest names in the business (Dell, Cisco etc…) and offering uptime, scalability and performance that shared hosting quite simply never could, more and more businesses are opting for cloud hosting solutions. It just makes good business sense.

Who we recommend

An Approved Host provider providing the most efficient Windows Cloud Hosting solution is GearHost.com.  Getting your website on the cloud environment is the right choice and you’ll have the reliability and dynamic scalability of this industry leading technology working for your website.  For more information on GearHost CloudSites Technology and the FindMyHost consumer guarantee included with your purchase visit:  www.findmyhost.com/gearhost.

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In most cases, the purpose of a CDN is really three-fold:

1. It offloads server processing for “static” resources such as images, Flash files, and JavaScript files to other servers, which reduces the loading on your own web/application servers.
2. CDNs are designed around a global infrastructure to ensure that the content being loaded comes from the most geographically optimal location. If you are located in the state of Texas and are hitting the CNN.com site in Atlanta (or wherever it sits), you won’t necessarily be sent a set of files from Atlanta – they may come from a CDN datacenter in Houston, Texas. This ensures fewer network hops which results in a faster page load and, the site owner’s hope, a good user experience which will keep you coming back for more.
3. The ability to manage specific content within a page such as advertising using a single management tool across a network of sites. This, in a way, blurs the lines of what a CDN is but for some the only offloaded content on a page may be the advertising, which in effect makes the ad delivery mechanism that site’s CDN.

Deployment of content onto a CDN can also help with search engine optimization (SEO) as the search engine algorithms now factor in speed as part of their scoring. Leading hosting providers today offer arrangements and direct integration into CDN providers through their toolsets so this is yet another item to be considered when selecting a hosting provider.

Approved Host provider who can assist with the tool-sets is DedicatedNOW.com.  For more information on DedicatedNOW and the FindMyHost consumer guarantee included with your purchase: www.findmyhost.com/dedicatednow.

The first principle of any backup is to always have a readily available and recent copy of your site configuration, software (i.e. application source code), and database structure, as well as a recent copy of the actual data within your database. How you obtain this backup can vary greatly, depending on your hosting provider and the quality of services they offer. Virtually all hosts today offer some form of backup, even if it’s just a weekly snapshot. The better hosts will advertise backup options, possibly even using industrial-strength software tools such as R1Soft CDP, which ensure that MySQL databases and other valuable data sources remain continuously backed up to a reliable underlying data store.

Another key component of a backup strategy is what to do in the event that an outage occurs (for example, due to a hard drive failure). The prepared site administrator will have already had discussions with the hosting provider and perhaps will have worked through a dry run of the backup recovery process, for several reasons. The first and primary reason is to make sure the recovery process actually works as advertised, since there are many disreputable hosts out there who cut corners and offer one thing while actually doing another.  A second reason is to certify that you are backing up and recovering all files that are truly required for you to resume operations, should a recovery be required. Finally, a third reason is to gauge the amount of time required in order to go from “nothing” (i.e. the web site is down) to “operational” (i.e. the full web site is back up).

As you can see, a comprehensive backup strategy requires a mix of good planning, good support, and good tools along with a time investment, but if your site and data is important to your business, it is an investment that may one day pay great dividends.

A recommended Approved Host provider who can assist in setting up a secure web hosting environment with automated backups is DedicatedNOW.com.  For a limited time, DedicatedNOW is offering free 50GB of R1Soft backup on all new servers. For more information on DedicatedNOW and the FindMyHost consumer guarantee included with your purchase: www.findmyhost.com/dedicatednow.

One popular web application firewall is dotDefender.  dotDefender is designed to provide website security against malicious attacks and website defacement attempts.  It offers enterprise-class security, advanced integration capabilities, easy maintenance, and low total cost of ownership (TCO).  dotDefender is a sophisticated web application firewall that secures your website using pattern recognition to analyze all incoming traffic, session protection which monitors runtime user sessions and prevents invalid tampering, and upload inspection, for monitoring uploads of all files to the local file system.

Another popular option used because it is available by default in many Windows-based installation is the Windows Firewall.  Windows Firewall primarily focuses on limiting access from unwanted applications but does not do any runtime monitoring of user sessions or inbound/outbound traffic signatures.

When selecting a web hosting provider, it is important to determine if the hosting provider is able to provide a range of products (such as hardware firewalls, software firewalls, web application firewalls, spam filters, etc) and services (such as configuration and management of firewall products) that can allow your hosted application infrastructure to grow as your business grows.

A recommended Approved Host provider who can assist you in setting up a secure web hosting environment is DedicatedNOW.com.  With each cPanel dedicated server you receive FREE server hardening and dotDefender.  For more information on DedicatedNOW and the FindMyHost consumer guarantee included with your purchase: www.findmyhost.com/dedicatednow.

The best hosting providers will offer support and a documented migration plan for moving sites and server configuration from your shared or virtualized environment to a dedicated server.  For hosts that offer control panel packages – such as cPanel – migration tools allow you to move configuration options between servers, which can greatly improve the time it takes to migrate between server installations, as well as improve the overall results of the migration process.  cPanel allows site administrators to configure a plethora of common operating system, memory, storage, and application options, including:

• Basic and advanced email configuration, including account management, spam blocking, authentication, and mailing lists
• Search engine optimization (SEO) tools, optimized for search engines such as Google
• File management utilities, such as disk space usage, FTP administration, and backups
• Application management, including handy configuration tools for managing popular apps such as Apache and MySQL
• Server security configuration, including SSH, SSL, and IP Deny management

If a tool such as cPanel is used to migrate configuration options, the overall migration process becomes much easier.  In addition to that, the “standard” steps required to migrate between hosts require application software in use to be installed and individually configured and, of course, DNS settings will need to be updated so your server can be found at its new IP address.  As mentioned earlier, the best web hosts will support every step of this process and answer questions (and even solve problems) as you move forward in this process.   It is always important to complete testing of the new environment before DNS records are updated, which will allow you time to test and resolve any issues before the public hits your new host.

A recommended Approved Host Dedicated Server provider is DedicatedNOW.com.  For more information on DedicatedNOW and the FindMyHost consumer guarantee included with your purchase, please visit: www.findmyhost.com/dedicatednow.