If you are migrating to Cloud environment, first of all get ready with your checklist for successful cloud. It’s no doubt cloud has become hot topic everywhere because of its mobility & flexibility at lower costs. Cloud infrastructures are next generation platforms that can provide tremendous value to any business. Many companies are now migrating to the advanced & cost effective concept of cloud hosting.

Successful migration to cloud needs evaluation all of pros and cons. Here I am trying to recommend some considerations while switching to cloud environment which will help you decide if you should move to the cloud or not. Here are some elementary steps before migrating to cloud.

1. First understand how in-demand is your website & how much downtime is acceptable for you.
2. What kind of control do you expect? If you want full control & willing to use all resources in a network, choose personal cloud.
3. What are your access options? Define your needs for access in advance.
4. What kind of application do you have currently? It sounds basic, but before migrating to the web, make sure is your application is a web application. You can choose some simple tools to convert it if required. If your application is native .NET/Java, you need to understand the technological aspects and compatibility options for these technologies within cloud you are targeting before migrating.
5. Are you using any interop for other technologies? Make sure that those technologies are also supported by the cloud you are willing to migrate.
6. What database type do you use? It is important to make sure that the target cloud can support the database you are using. If it doesn’t support, check if you can change the DB or run the application on cloud & use on-premise DB.
7. Flexibility and transferability: Check whether you can move between cloud providers. If you are allowed access to a specific provider after the app is deployed it may put restrictions on your ability to transfer to another cloud platform.
8. Scalability: Confirm whether you are able to afford dynamic scalability and redundancy to the server parts of your application? If you cannot scale dynamically, avoid moving to cloud.
9. Security risks in the cloud: First of all, evaluate the vendor’s regulations & reputation. Then go ahead & understand security risks that can be revealed by making the client available from any system that is connected to the web.
10. Upgrade costs. Check for different vendors & packages they are offering with detailed specifications. Speculate what are the costs and technical implications while upgrading your application.

These are some of the important tips you should consider before migrating to cloud environment. I believe this would help you choose right kind of cloud hosting option & help you achieve maximum benefit.

Article Sponsored By Atlantic.Net

Established in 1994, Atlantic.Net is a market-leading Cloud Hosting Solutions Provider renowned for providing exceptional infrastructure as a service, simplifying complex technologies and building a brand that people trust.

Atlantic.Net provides industrial grade and massively scalable cloud server platform backed by world class data center infrastructure. Please visit www.atlantic.net/cloud and take advantage of a free trial of world class cloud servers today!

What is in it for you?
Building a website is not a difficult task, but maintaining it is quite critical. It requires most of your time, hard work & expenditure in maintaining a website manually irrespective of size of your organization. If you are a small scale organization, you might need fewer resources to manage it but if you are large scale organization, you need more resources & manpower to manage your website & get desired benefits. Though you do all that needed for it, possibility of expected income seems to be vanished. To avoid the huge loss for what you are investing, choose the best method of managing the website – Virtual Private Server Hosting!

Basically VPS Hosting is subscription based server virtualization. It is a method of dividing a server in to several parts which operate like multiple servers. Each of them runs its own operating system, uses its own bandwidth and disk space. Each VPS can be individually rebooted at any time, & you can also monitor resource usage and keep track of traffic statistics of your website.

Economic way of maintaining website!
If your website is most visited website or busy website & has constantly growing number of visitors, downloads & hits, but cannot afford a dedicated server solution to hold the increased load to the website, then you have got good option of cost-effective VPS hosting solution. It ensures the protected hosting environment, with all the crucial resources that a dedicated server would provide such as CPU, memory, disk space and bandwidth, exclusively allocated to you.

You can choose an operating system and, also you can install your own software configurations as you get root access at your section. Though it is less expensive compared to dedicated & cloud hosting, it has some drawbacks. Unlike Cloud Hosting, resources are used from single physical machine which acts as virtual server. It gives freedom of operating independently of other users on the same physical machine but still some Hardware assets are shared such as CPU, RAM, and Disk I/O.

VPS is most chosen hosting solution by small as well as large organizations because it is less expensive than dedicated hosting & hosting provider maintains hardware and network infrastructures allowing full administrative (root) access at your division. You have two options to pay – a fixed amount for limited resources or paying amount per resource like CPU, memory, network, storage etc. per hour. It is expensive than shared hosting as you have own hardware & network infrastructure but could be still cost effective if you use allotted space only.

Article Sponsored By Atlantic.Net

Established in 1994, Atlantic.Net is a market-leading Cloud Hosting Solutions Provider renowned for providing exceptional infrastructure as a service, simplifying complex technologies and building a brand that people trust.

Atlantic.Net provides industrial grade and massively scalable cloud server platform backed by world class data center infrastructure. Please visit www.atlantic.net/cloud and take advantage of a free trial of world class cloud servers today!

Approved Host Codero launched V2 of their customer portal last month.  Today we are speaking with Nicholas Gaugler, VP of Development at Codero Hosting about the recent upgrades and benefits it brings to their customers.

The layout and graphics are stunning in the new portal. It looks totally rebuilt from the last version. I understand that customer usability was the main focus of the re-design.

How long did the reworking take of the Server Portal and did you consult with clients on the navigation?
We began focusing on the new Server Portal in July of 2010 and launched the official version in early December, spending just over 5 months on the project. We used feedback from Codero employees and clients over the last year as a starting point for feature enhancements and built from there. Additionally we also surveyed our existing customer base during the process to further help guide the design and development cycle. In November, we launched a beta program where we rolled the software out to additional subsets of our customer base weekly to obtain more user input and suggestions.

Are customers able to remotely reboot their servers using Server Portal?
Yes, Remote Reboot tool is currently available in the initial release, as its own section within the portal. With the next release (SP v2.1), Remote Reboot along with other features will be moved into the server management section giving customers better navigation than even SP v2.0 offers.

Are customers able to review bandwidth data using Server Portal?
Two methods are available for viewing bandwidth. The first, allows one to see the actual amount of transfer a server utilized, down to the IP address, on a given day or over a given period. The second method provides a view of bandwidth through switch port traffic graphs. This allows for insight into traffic patterns at various times throughout the day providing a better understanding of the server’s use and visitor base.

Can you elaborate on Cloud and what functions will be built in to Server Portal for Cloud servers?
Cloud is an amazing thing, we actually have multiple clouds deployed right now at Codero hosting our Server Portal, corporate website and other systems our customers and employees use daily and we love it. Putting applications or websites in the cloud at Codero allows you to run your application or website in a highly available virtualized environment. The beauty of cloud is you can customize your solution without worrying about the hardware behind the scenes. It provides the ability to pick and choose the exact specifications you want and have a virtualized instance up and running within a matter of minutes. The new Server Portal will fully integrate with our new cloud offering and provide the ability to increase resources and create one or 100 cloud instances and have them ready in a matter of minutes. Customers will also be able to pick and choose the exact operating system, or clone an existing cloud, if they already have an instance set up exactly how they want. You will also be able to change the resources allocated to an existing cloud as well, whether you want to increase (or decrease) the processing power, RAM or even hard drive space. Cloud is very remarkable and I think it will amaze customers just as it has amazed us.

Resellers may be interested in knowing what additional features will be available to them when Server Portal is updated.

Anything you can share with our readers on that? Continue reading “Approved Host Codero Streamlines Control Panel for its Customers” »

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If you’re fortunate enough to have a growing online business, you will find your hosting needs growing along with it.  What may have started as a single server may now begin to resemble a burgeoning IT shop, with multiple web servers, database servers, mail servers, and file servers.   All businesses reach a threshold where security and reliability of the environment becomes paramount – to the point where it becomes a higher priority to protect the assets and infrastructure before investing any further in functionality and business growth.  One of the first appliances deployed to protect that infrastructure is a firewall, which can be defined as a hardware and/or software appliance whose primary purpose is to protect network resources by limiting or eliminating unauthorized access to those resources.  While larger businesses often opt to invest in hardware firewalls capable of on-the-fly packet filtering, encryption of all incoming and outgoing requests, and processing of extremely large numbers of concurrent connections, small-to-mid-sized businesses are often best served by software firewalls and specifically Web Application Firewalls, or WAFs.

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. Continue reading “Beefing Up Security With Web Application Firewalls” »

Shared hosting is the choice of many small business websites as well as a preferred option for many bloggers and individuals maintaining low-to-moderately trafficked personal web sites.  Shared hosting has a number of advantages, but obviously first and foremost among these for most small businesses is cost.  Unfortunately, shared hosting has a number of disadvantages, particularly for sites experiencing large fluctuations in traffic, performance issues, or for those sites that really require lower-level access to the underlying operating system and/or server hardware.  On a shared host, your site can be affected by one of the other dozens – or even hundreds – of sites and web applications that may be running on the same physical hardware.

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.

The short answer is absolutely, but the more important question is “Are you running an ecommerce business which requires you to be on a PA-DSS certified application?”

A quick explanation: PA-DSS is a standard set by the PCI Security Council designed to increase the security of your storefront. The council set a deadline of July 1, 2010 for all merchants to be on a PA-DSS complaint system. Merchants not meeting the deadline could face additional fees from their merchant services provider or loss of their merchant services account entirely.

So, still, do you need to be on a complaint system?  For the most part yes, though there are some exceptions the council have outlined. First, if your cart never transmits or stores credit card information, a compliant cart isn’t required. For example, if you’re only using PayPal Traditional and the customer is transferred over to PayPal to complete the order, you are fine. However, if you’re using any other PayPal method, or a method where the credit card is accepted on your site (authorize.net or intuit for example) and the payment information is posted to your payment provider for authorization, you need a compliant cart. Another exception is in-house applications which are not sold or distributed.

The rules are very specific, if your storefront STORES or TRANSFERS customer sensitive information, you are required to be compliant.  Of course, the easy solution is simply move to a payment system (like PayPal Traditional) that moves your customer over to their site to complete the transaction.  Anyone in the ecommerce world for even a short period of time knows this action can have a significantly negative impact on sales.  Moving a customer from one site to another to complete a transaction increases cart abandonments, sometimes as much as 30% or more.

This standard isn’t designed to make a merchant’s life more difficult, but to increase the security of internet transactions.  In the end, secure transactions and increased customer confidence result in more business for all merchants conducting business on the internet – and that’s a good thing.

If you’re in the market for ecommerce software, you must determine if the company’s offerings are PA-DSS complaint.  If the software is not PA-DSS compliant, weigh potential risks – both personal and financial.  Even if you don’t accept credit cards on your site today, understand you will need to eventually if you expect to grow your business. If you’re using an existing ecommerce platform, be sure they are compliant or inquire as to when they expect to achieve compliance. The deadline has passed, and merchant account providers will certainly start assessing fees soon if they haven’t already.

Article written for MyHostNews.com by Craig Fox, Founder and VP of Marketing for Pinnacle Cart, the leading eCommerce / Store Builder application for small to mid size businesses.  For more information, please visit www.pinnaclecart.com

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You may have heard rumors that virtualization, cloud hosting, VPS services, and other “virtual” solutions are more expensive, unreliable, slower, have a complex migration, and are difficult to manage. However, all of these could be far from the truth.  What is certain is that with virtualization you will be spending more time and energy on your business and improving your offerings than on worrying about datacenter issues and downtime.

Virtualization is a loosely used term for too many offerings and solutions that today’s web hosting companies are trying to sell you. What is virtualization? At the most fundamental level, virtualization is the ability to run one environment, such as an operating system, inside of another environment (such as an operating system). Imagine running Windows Vista inside of Windows 7 or running multiple instances of Linux inside of Windows (or any other operating system).  Virtualization simply lets you allocate different amounts of resources and privileges to other parts of the physical server.

You may be asking yourself how this is any different from the classic shared hosting environments you are used to renting from GoDaddy, 1and1, and others. All of these services are “shared” in nature, but you aren’t actually renting a piece of the entire server that your website is on, only some web space to upload your files over FTP and to run your website through their web server.

Which sort of virtualization is right for your needs? If you have a small website with a few hits, then you should continue paying your webhost $10/month or less for your FTP space and web server access. But what if you have something more complex such an open-source forum, a small MySQL database, some custom PHP content, and your website? Again, it depends on how much traffic you get. If you receive very little traffic, shared hosting may still be your solution. By now you must be wondering why you’d ever need anything besides shared hosting for $10/month.

The answer is you probably don’t and the salesman on the other end of the phone is trying to sell you services that are too powerful for your needs. What if you really have a need for serious web hosting services? It’s clear that there are plenty of companies that have a requirement for better computing resources, so what sorts of requirements do you need to justify higher costs and a more sophisticated hosting environment?

Part 1 – Ownership:

When you own your own servers, much like you own your car, your sense of ownership may provide you with a false feeling of security. It’s true that by owning your servers you feel like no one can access or tamper with them, but what about the downsides? Hard drive failures, motherboard failures, network card failures, power supply failures, etc. In addition to your responsibility of maintaining the hardware, you will probably also need to purchase remote IP KVM’s or computers with remote access integrated into the motherboard which carry a higher price tag, remote power rebooters so you don’t have to painfully wait for datacenter technicians to restart your servers, and shipping spare parts when they are needed. With a virtual solution all of these problems do not exist. In a virtual environment, you can experiment and customize your server as much as you want, break it, and just start a new virtual instance at any time without worrying about anything. Continue reading “The Pros and Cons of Virtualization Web Hosting” »

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Web Hosting News -  Herndon, VA - Small businesses can now improve their productivity and speed up the flow of critical information with a mobile app designed to make popular business forms available on the go. Deluxe Corporation (NYSE:DLX) and Canvas announced today a pilot program that will deliver Deluxe’s most popular paper forms to its small business customers with a smartphone application designed to run on Android™, Windows Mobile® and Blackberry®, as well as laptops, netbooks and tablet-based computing devices. During the pilot, the apps are available at the Deluxe Mobile App Store and will be free for a limited time.

‘At Deluxe, our goal is to provide small business with innovative solutions that make it easier to manage and grow their businesses,’ said Ed Wolfe, strategic alliances manager for Deluxe Corporation. ‘Our new mobile apps offer small businesses a whole new way to fill-out and manage their paperwork – from service estimates to work orders – quickly and easily.’ Continue reading “Deluxe and Canvas Pilot Mobile Apps for Small Business” »

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Web Hosting News – BOSTON - Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Cisco, the worldwide leader in networking, today announced the expansion of their virtualization collaboration with the integration of Cisco Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) technology with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. With this integration, Red Hat and Cisco customers will have an opportunity to achieve higher performance, greater network visibility and control and a reduced total cost of ownership for their datacenter virtualization deployments.

Bringing the network and virtualization domains closer to simplify datacenter deployments, Red Hat and Cisco are integrating the Cisco Unified Computing System Virtual Interface Card with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor included in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. This combination creates a logical network infrastructure that will help to provide full visibility, control and consistency of the network for virtualization without sacrificing performance. VN-Link automates the movement of network and storage services so they can follow virtual machines as they are moved around the datacenter, helping to ensure consistent policy-driven network capabilities across all servers, physical or virtual, in a customer’s datacenter. With this combination: Continue reading “Red Hat and Cisco Expand Relationship with Virtualization Technology Integration” »

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Web Hosting Reviews – Oklahoma City, OK - Web Hosting Directory and Review site www.FindMyHost.com released its March 2010 Editor’s Choice Awards today. Web Hosting companies strive to provide their customers with the very best service and support. We want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the hosts per category who have excelled in their field. The FindMyHost Editors’ Choice Awards are chosen based on Editor and Consumer Reviews.

Customers who wish to submit positive reviews for the current or past Web Host are free to do so by visiting the customer review section of FindMyHost.com Click here to submit a review for your Web Host and nominate them for next months Editors’ Choice awards. We would like to congratulate all web hosts and The following list of web hosting providers excelled in their field of service, congratulations to all and keep up the great work!

APLUS.NET	iNetU.Net	HostICan
www.Aplus.Net	www.iNetU.Net	www.HostICan.com
ADULTHOSTING.COM	NETWORK SOLUTIONS	NAVISITE
www.AdultHosting.com	www.NetworkSolutions.com	www.NaviSite.com
VERIO	SUPERB	JUST HOST
www.Verio.com	www.Superb.net	www.JustHost.com
LUNARPAGES	247-HOST	SERVINT
www.Lunarpages.com	www.247-Host.com	www.ServInt.com
NETELLIGENT	NETELLIGENT	CODERO
www.Netelligent.ca	www.Netelligent.ca	www.Codero.com
HOSTFORWEB	HOSTGATOR
www.Hostforweb.com	www.Hostgator.com

About FindMyHost
FindMyHost, Inc. is an online magazine that provides editor reviews, consumer hosting news, interviews discussion forums and more. FindMyHost.com was established in January 2001 to protect web host consumers and web developers from making the wrong choice when choosing a web host. FindMyHost.com showcases a selection of web hosting companies who have undergone their approved host program testing and provides reviews from customers. FindMyHost’s extensive website can be found at www.FindMyHost.com.