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VPS Web Hosting for Small Businesses

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If you are running a small business website and have grown your site to a point where you are attracting many hundreds or even thousands of visitors per day, you will need to start thinking about using a more powerful web hosting plan.

One solution may be to go out and order a dedicated server, but this option can be an expensive one. If you can’t afford a dedicated server at this point but require a similar site performance, then VPS web hosting may be a better solution for you.

VPS (virtual private server) hosting consists of one server divided into multiple isolated accounts, and each VPS account has its own independent operating system with it’s own web server and mail server resources, so there is no sharing of resources with other customers even though your accounts are on the same server. Just like a dedicated server, you can have access to all configuration files within your account which means a greater ability for you to install and run custom software if you’d like to.

VPS web hosting accounts are designed to cope with a high level of traffic. Most VPS plans provide bandwidth allowance of 100’s of gigabytes which is usually more than enough for most purposes, even for extremely popular websites.

While some experienced webmasters will want to manage the technical aspects of their VPS accounts, this can become a time-consuming and complicated task for the unprepared. This is one reason many people prefer to have their VPS web hosting accounts fully managed and monitored by the web hosting company. Sometimes you may need pay a few dollars per month more for this, but this can free up your valuable time and energy to concentrate on providing quality content and promoting your site.

VPS hosting plans usually cost considerably less than a dedicated server. A managed dedicated server might cost from $150 per month up to $300 per month or more, but you can expect to pay just $35-$50 per month for an entry-level, fully managed VPS hosting account and this will allow you to run multiple sites from one account. You should be provided with an operating system, control panel, your own allocation of RAM memory, plus large space and bandwidth resources. At least 256MB guaranteed ram is suggested in order to run your control panels and database driven sites smoothly. For higher traffic sites consider starting with 384MB or 512MB of guaranteed Ram or more.

Many websites that offer VPS hosting also offer cheap reseller hosting plans if you are interested in becoming a hosting reseller.




DTI Data offers hard drive recovery services and software

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I’ve you’ve never been unlucky enough to have gone through a hard drive crash and major loss of data I envy you. I might be luckier than some as I’ve only experienced complete hard drive failure once and that was due to a computer virus.

All I can say is that if you’ve never experienced this you’re lucky and whether you have or haven’t had a hard drive failure you should take some basic steps to prevent hard drive failure or to make recovering your data a fairly easy task.

Some obvious ways of protecting your computer and your data are:

1. Keep your software up to date by upgrading using the latest stable release.

2. Use an anti-virus program to protect your computer.

3. Never open a file that arrives in your email if it’s from someone that you don’t know, if you weren’t expecting the attachment or if it seems suspicious in any way.

4. Backup your data to another hard drive, server, external drive, CD or DVD regularly.

There are many reasons why your hard drive might fail. Power failure is another reason, as is visiting a website that infects your computer with malicious code. However, in my opinion, failing to do some or all of the above mentioned suggestions are probably the number one reasons that lead to hard drive failure.

I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to friends, relatives, coworkers or web friends and they’ve told me that their hard drive crashed or some of the programs that they rely on most won’t work anymore. When I ask them if they have a recent backup or if they use an anti virus program more often than not they say no.

Hard drive failure is bad enough for the home computer user, but if the hard drive failure occurs on a business computer or servers hard drive it could mean downtime, loss of income and loss of valuable company data.

For those who’s hard drives have failed and they are unfortunate enough not to have a backup of their data, or perhaps had a backup failure as well as a crashed hard drive there are companies such as DTI Data that specialize in hard drive recovery. Not only is DTI DATA the only manufacturer authorized data recovery company to provide flat rate pricing for hard drive recovery, but they also have a fantastic data guarantee:

If DTI DATA fails to recover your data you don’t pay!

That claim does come with an exception. If your hard drive was opened elsewhere the guarantee doesn’t apply.

DTI Data can perform hard drive repair on many types of hard drives and servers. For example they offer services for SCSI Hard Drive repair and recovery, Exchange Server Recovery, RAID Data Recovery, laptop hard drive recovery, Western Digital hard drive recovery and even adaptive logic hard drive recovery for those who sent their hard drive to another company for repair before trying DTI Data.

Data recovery and hard drive repair takes place in a class 100 clean room.

DTI Data also offers a number of Data Recovery Resources such as do it yourself recovery software that has been developed in house.

You’ll find software that can be purchased on their website that will help you recover all of the data on your hard drive, assist in recovering lost digital pictures, CD/CDRW DVD/DVDRW drive data recovery, fast file undelete, e-Recovery for Outlook Express and Outlook as well as other forms of data recovery software.

If you’ve been unfortunate enough to have a hard drive failure visit the site and fill out their online quote form or call their toll free number to talk with one of their hard drive recovery specialists.

It’s important to backup your data regularly

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Whether your an occasional at home computer user or someone who relies heavily on your computer for business there’s no denying how important it is to back up your vital files regularly. All it takes is a computer virus or a power failure and your data could be lost forever.

While there are many back up programs that you could use I think you might agree that Backup Platinum has quite a few useful features.

Backup Platinum allows you to back up your data to pretty much any type of storage medium meaning you could store your valuable backup data on another computer, a network, an external drive, an FTP server or even a CD or DVD.

Not only that, you can set up regular backups using the program wizard in order to define what is backed up, where it’s backup from, how to back up your data and when those backups should take place.

If you chose to backup your data onto a CD or DVD you can use a rewritable disk. The program can be set up so that any data on the disk is erased prior transferring new backup data. This means that you could set the Backup Platinum program to create a new backup each night and only the latest backup would be on your rewritable CD or DVD.

Backups can be kept small and secure thanks to the programs 128-bit encryption with Blowfish and multichoice ZIP. Also, if you happen to have a lot of data to backup the backup can be split into several parts which would make it easier to transfer your finished backup data elsewhere if needed.

One thing that I like about this program is that it creates detailed logs of all operations and if something goes wrong with your backup you can easily restore with a simple click of a button.

Backup Platinum has been specifically designed to work on Windows operating systems.

If you’d like to try Backup Platinum you can download a limited 30 day trial version. Then if you like the programs features you can purchase the license for a full copy.

Google sites – coming soon

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I don’t think that there’s much that Google doesn’t have it’s hand in these days.

The latest news is that we’ll soon be able to create websites on Google. The sites will run on Google servers and I imagine will be fairly easy to use for non-techies. By that I mean you won’t have to know much if any code to create a website of your own within a matter of minutes!

Here’s a news story I found that discusses Google’s latest step into the world of website creation:

AspDotNetStorefront E-commerce shopping cart

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If you have an online store or perhaps want to start one in order to sell your merchandise you should visit the AspDotNetStorefront e-commerce by design website.

Perhaps you’ve been using another service for your e-commerce store or have been struggling with freeware e-commerce software, but you’ve found that it doesn’t offer you flexibility or the ease of use that you had been hoping to find. If that’s the case you need to visit AspDotNetStorefront and download a free trial of their ecommerce software solution.

AspDotNetStorefront will not only make it easier for you to set up your ecommerce storefront, but it will also help you promote your site on search engines. The software provides integrated seamless support for search engine indexing. Every page of your storefront can be indexed on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. There is also full control over all meta tags, page descriptions, titles, and keywords. All of which will ensure that your site is indexed properly.

There are actually so many features it’s hard to know where to begin to describe them to you.

AspDotNetStorefront is designed to be flexible. The creators of this innovative E-commerce shopping cart software have ensured that you can make your store unique. You can design store front skins using Dreamweaver or Frontpage.

Merchants can access their storefront via a web based control panel.

How will your clients pay for your merchandise? That’s up to you! AspDotNetStorefront supports a number of payment systems such as Paypal, Linkpoint, Verisign, credit card, E-Check, Check by mail and Authorize.net. Shipping rates are also integrated into the software for services such as FedEx, USPS, DHL, and Canada Post.

There’s no limits on the size of the database or the number of products that you can sell from your e-commerce site. Nor is there a limit to the amount of departments or categories that you can create.

AspDotNetStorefront users can password protect topics, set minimum quantities, and have the ability to track affiliates through order records and customer.

I’ve barely touched on the number of features within this e-commerce software package. You really need to visit the site for yourself to read about all the features. It’s mind boggling! If I were setting up an e-commerce storefront I would seriously consider this product. Check it out.

Network Solutions now offers VPS Hosting

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As many of the regular readers of The Webfiles know I’ve had quite a bit of hosting troubles in the last few months. I’ve had to change hosts three times because my sites – 10 domains with 17 sites between them – have overused the CPU resources at which ever web hosting company I was using a the time.

As I tried to explain on one of my other blogs, even a huge surge of traffic such as one that might come from a very well stumbled or dugg post could push my current hosting account over it’s limit! This problem will become worse as my new domains start to gain traffic.

I’ve got to face it. I’m going to have to move my sites over to a hosting provider that can offer me VPS hosting. It’s a reality and it would be better if I make the move before I encounter problems with my current host.

One company that has just begun to offer VPS Hosting is Network Solutions.

As some of you might know a Virtual Private Server hosting account is the step between shared hosting which is what most people start out with when they decide to host a website on their own domain and a dedicated hosting account.

With a shared hosting account you share the servers resources with all the other account holders that use that service. Some web hosts oversell their accounts and an account holder like myself with websites that have fairly high traffic and that use databases and other software to run them can get into trouble quite easily by overusing the system resources allocated to them on that server.

With a VPS account the server is virtually partitioned so that each account holder has the ability to run their own operating system and applications (ie wordpress, databases, CMS, Forums and so on) and if something goes wrong they can reboot their portion of the server independently from the rest of the VPS account holders on the same system.

In other words as a VPS account user you’d have more control over your hosting account and the server that you are using.

Companies, like Network Solutions, that provide VPS hosting services often allocate more resources to their VPS accounts than they do for those with shared hosting. So there should be a higher percentage of CPU resources and RAM allocated to each account.

Network Solutions offers three VPS hosting packages – VPS Standard, VPS Advanced and VPS PRO. The basic features of each account are the amount of disk space offered – 10 GB to 50 GB, Monthly Data Transfer 500 GB up to 2000 GB, the maximum amount of domains that can be hosted in each VPS account ranges from 10 to 100, and each comes with the ability to create 50 to 200 POP E-Mail accounts.

The VPS Standard and Advanced hosting packages come with SWsoft light Pack software, and the VPS PRO package comes with SWsoft Deluxe. I believe that all of the packages include Virtuozzo and the Plesk Control Panels.

Their pricing for VPS hosting looks reasonable to me. The Standard package starts at $50 per month, where as their Advanced costs $75 per month and their PRO VPS hosting costs $100 per month.

There are a few things that I like about Network Solutions VPS Hosting service. The will assist you with the creation of your account and the creation of a domain. Certainly as a newbie to VPS I, for one, would need that service! They will also assist you with the installation of applications from their application vault as well as customizing the Plesk desktop and other server related service issues. They have a toll free number and they offer both online and live 24/7 support. Believe me, whatever type of hosting account you have, a company that offers both a toll free number as well as 24/7 support is something you’ll want to have when you run into issues with your hosting account!

I’m going to look further into Network Solutions VPS hosting because as I said I’m going to need to upgrade my hosting very soon. If you think you might need to switch to VPS hosting or that you might want to move your current VPS hosting account over to a new host do visit the Network Solutions site to see if their VPS hosting packages suit your needs.

Got an old cellphone? Check out CellForCash

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Have you ever wondered what to do with your old cell phone? I’m sure that there’s a lot of people out there with an old mobile phone or two stored in a drawer some where in their home that they’ve kept simply because they didn’t know what to do with it. Worse, there’s a lot of cell phones in landfills throughout North America possibly leaching toxins such as lead into the soil and eventually into the ground water.

I think it would be great if all cell phone providers, when they come out with their awesome deals on new phones that we must have, would offer rebates on our old phones no matter how old they are or their condition. They don’t though, do they?

That’s where CellForCash.com. They’ve create a program that allows US residents to recycle their old cellphones. Simply visit their site and use their mobile phone manufacture and model search to see if your phone is listed and how much of a rebate you’ll receive from CellForCash. You can then finish filling out your contact information, decide if you want the rebate or if you’d like to donate it to a charity called the 911 Cell Phone Bank which benefits seniors and victims of abuse and then CellForCash will send you a free postage paid box with which you can submit your phone.

Cellforcash.com currently lists over 600 cell phone models that will qualify for rebates. The rebate payout ranges from $4 to $300 or more.

Just think about it. When you use Cellforcash to recycle your cell phone, not only will you be protecting the environment by keeping one more old cell phone out of the landfills, but you can also benefit by receiving some money back for your phone or donating those funds to a worthwhile charity.

You should read the article “Why should I recycle my cell phone?” which explains why recycling cell phones is so important. Did you know that each year more than 140 million cell phones are retired and that not even 5% of those old phones are recycled? Isn’t that a terrible shame?

Did you know that the circuit boards and other components that make up cell phones contain toxic materials such as arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, lead, cobalt, copper, mercury, nickel, and zinc, and brominated flame retardants. As I said earlier all of these chemicals and heavy minerals could leach into the ground waters and eventually effect our drinking water or damage the environment in ways that would eventually have an effect on ourselves and our health.

Old cellphones in decent condition might be used in other markets or countries, or the components and materials within your turned in cell phone might be recovered, recycled and then other industries might use those recycled materials to make new products.

My hosting troubles – the full story

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Andy Beard was nice enough to let others know about my hosting problems with Lunarpages and I thought I would just give a few more details about what happened in my month of hosting hell!

I must begin by saying that if Lunarpages hadn’t pulled what I’ve come to think of as a “fast one” by charging me for two years worth of VPS when I wanted a monthly account I might still be with them. They refunded, but did not apologize.

I will more than likely need a VPS or a Dedicated hosting account in the near future.

If you are looking to switch web hosts I wouldn’t go with Lunarpages – not because of my story (they were fine up until I had troubles), but because they only provide phone support from 8 am until 8 pm Monday to Friday. If something goes wrong with your sites you want 24/7 support, preferably with a web host that offers 24/7 phone support. It makes a difference.

Unlike others who’ve recently had hosting problems with their web hosts due to high CPU resource issues Lunarpages wouldn’t tell me what time my problems started on the days that they noticed a high CPU resource usage. It certainly might have helped if I’d known exactly what time the problem occurred.

It would have also helped if they could have told me which of my many domains the problem was located on. Surely a web hosting company must be able to see that in their daily logs?

I have 10 domains. 15 WordPress installations, 16 blogs, one very large HTML based website (it’s been around since 1995 so it’s busy), and one website that’s run using the Joomla CMS.

When a web host tells you that your account has used too much CPU resources and can’t tell you what caused the problem other than it was a script on one of your sites, and you have as many sites and two types of scripted website platforms (Joomla and WordPress) to go through as I do it’s pretty near impossible to pinpoint what is causing the problem.

Web hosting companies need to be able to give their clients more information when a problem occurs. They’ll have happier customers, will be more likely to retain their client base and obviously the website owner would be more than likely happy to fix a potential problem with their site. Bad scripts and plugins don’t only occasionally cause cpu resource issues, they are often security risks too.

Almost everything that I use on my sites was up to date, but I did go through my sites and spent time updating any plugins that had been updated, and I removed plugins that I thought might call the database too often. A post view counter plugin and post rating plugin were removed. If anything was causing a problem I suspect it could have been these plugins, but I removed them June 26th – hours after getting my first notice of CPU problems. I basically only left the plugins or add ons that I thought were essential to the running of my sites.

Lunarpages kept coming back telling me that my sites were using too much CPU resources after I’d done all of the above. I even went through all my directories looking for any files that seemed too large or ones that I didn’t recognize in case there were files that I hadn’t put there. I didn’t find anything out of order.

At this point I’m not sure that I had a problem with any of my plugins, modules or components. It might simply have been a traffic problem or spam attack.

I think it’s also interesting to note that I heard from Lunarpages approximately four times in the first two weeks beginning June 26th. Each time they reported my CPU resource overuse. I then went a period of almost two weeks without hearing from them. By this time I’d deleted plugins and upgraded anything that had needed upgrading. I wrote to them asking if my problems were resolved since I hadn’t been hearing from them and they wrote back to tell me that I still had CPU resource issues. Three days later they suspended my account.

Whether that means anything exactly I don’t know, but if this issue was happening daily wouldn’t they have been reporting the issue to me daily?

The day my account was suspended they shut me down at 11:35 am. I was not home at the time so I know I wasn’t doing anything to my sites that might have caused an overuse of CPU resource, say deleting spam for example, when the trouble occurred.

The issue that finally shut me down must have been due to traffic or calls to the database. All they would tell me was that the resource usage when up so high that it almost crashed the non production server that my account was on.

In the month of July my sites in total got 1.2 million page views. That’s with all my sites down for almost four days, and several time outs throughout the month of July. The majority of those page views were on the seven blogs that I have on my feverishthoughts.com domain (over 800,000 page views) with Tricia’s Musings, As the Garden Grows and Odd planet being the most popular sites.

Since Lunarpages was unable or unwilling to tell me what times my CPU resources went up, or on which domain, it was very difficult to pinpoint where the problem was occurring or even if there truly was a problem with one of my scripts.

If they’d been able to tell me that it was the feverishthoughts.com domain I would have first suspected high traffic as the cause. If they’d said it was on my Joomla run domain I would have suspected a faulty script.

I didn’t go around yelling Lunarpages sucks. I’m still not doing that. I’ve had a bad experience that left a bad taste in my mouth, but others might have years of successful hosting with them.

I appreciate that in the beginning they moved my account to another server – a slower non production server that slowed my sites and that was perhaps less able to handle my traffic – so that I’d have some time to figure out the source of my problem.

Their handling of my issues beginning on July 21st when my account was suspended and their subsequent moving of my account to VPS after I’d told them NO when they mentioned the $75 hour service charge and then going ahead, doing it anyway, creating a two year VPS account when I’d only originally agreed to a monthly account which should have been covered using the remainder of the balance of my two year shared hosting account (19 months remained!) and then charging me $642 – well yeah … that makes them suck. That’s just plain wrong.

Each time I wrote to support it took anywhere from 8 to 24 hours for a reply. The majority of my issue with them happened on the weekend when they do not offer phone support and I suspect have fewer staff working.

I felt like I was writing the same questions, requests and or instructions over and over again in my dealings with support. They weren’t listening.

I don’t think that I’m that hard to understand. Am I? 😉 No means no, yes means yes, send me more info means send me more info. Right?

I do think that in the near future I will have to move to VPS or dedicated hosting because my traffic is increasing substantially each month. 6 of my domains are newish and I haven’t done much to promote them, once they begin to get busy I’m sure I’ll need to upgrade.

I am interested in hearing what companies others are dealing with, and I’d prefer to be able to use C-panel as that’s what I’m used to although I can learn a new system if I need to.

when I quickly had to change web hosts I went with Hostgator and have been with them since July 23 or 24. Not long enough to fully assess their service.

I will say that I do appreciate that they have a support ticket system, live chat and telephone support – all 24/7. I’m on shared hosting right now but they also offer what they call semi dedicated (which I think must be like VPS) and Dedicated servers so I can move up if I have a problem or if my sites get too busy.

Dell notebook delay irritates customers

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Dell recently irritated a number of their customers who’d been waiting for the new Dell XPS M1330 notebook to ship. The shipments problem seems to be over, but Dell may need a period of recovery after this disaster.


Customers have been posting hundreds of messages on Dells Direct2Dell blog. Those post are not just upset over the delay, they feel that they’ve been mislead.

Dells blog is supposed to be a tool to communicate with customers, potential new clients and the media, but the blog has recently become an outlet for the multitude of complaints that have been pouring in over the XPS M1330 notebook.

The notebook was announced in late June and was expected to have delivery dates of up to four to six weeks for some customers. This is a much longer shipping time than had been anticipated.

Clients have been visiting the blog to post their complaints over customer service, and miscommunication during ordering.

Dell’s made a mission to move forward yet this product delay is a step backwards judging by the publics displeasure over shipping delays.

What do you think of this situation? Should they have delayed their announcement that the product was ready for sale if it really wasn’t? Did they under estimate the demand for this high end laptop?

Are you one of the impatient buyers?

“I need a new design” contest – Enter Now

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Are you tired of the look of your web site? Ready for a change?

Why not enter the “I need a new design” contest that’s being held by lifeBLUE Media.

LifeBLUE specializes in web design, graphic design, SEO, Internet marketing, application development, and web hosting. Visit the site and take a look at their portfolio. They are featuring some very nice web designs that they’ve done for past clients. You’ll be in good hands if you win the contest.

It’s easy to enter the I need a new design contest. Simply visit the LifeBlUE.com website and fill out the contest entry form. Unfortunately this contest is only open to US residents. Otherwise I’d probably enter this plain Jane site myself.

Once you enter the contest you can tell your friends, family and site visitors about the contest and ask them to vote for your site. As you’ll see by visiting the contest link above the site that’s in the lead is shown as a larger image in the collage of sites that have entered.

designcontest.jpg

The contest began and July 9th and submissions and votes will be collected until August 8th, 2007. There’s still plenty of time to take the lead and win a professionally designed web design.

The winner will receive a custom design that will be in both graphical format as well as html format. The design will be created by LifeBLUE’s experienced design team.

The winner will of course have the ability to provide feedback on the design and information about the goal and direction of the site so that the team will be able to create a suitable design that will take your site well into the future.

There are actually two ways to win this contest as two winners will be selected.

One way is to simply submit your site as described above and then to garner votes. The person who has the most votes, and likely the worst current design as determined by their voting friends, family and site visitors will win a free web design.

The second way to enter this contest is to enter the random draw. Write up a blog post and use the following anchor text to link to the main index page of LifeBLUE Media:

Link url – http://www.lifeblue.com/web_design_contest/

Text: web design, web designers, website design, web design company

I presume that the people at LifeBLUE will be keeping track of incoming links with any of those link phrases and that they will add those sites to the random draw.

Why are you still here?

Get going! Enter the contest! A free web design would be fantastic wouldn’t it?

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