Tag Archives: Web Space

What Should You Have Before You Buy Web Hosting Space?

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Buying web hosting is a matter of a few clicks. But what planning should be done before you buy it? Not everyone knows what to do once they buy the hosting space and many months are wasted planning what to do after you have bought the space. A good plan of action helps you to save money and utilize your purchased space better. How much disk space you need, how much bandwidth you will consume all depends on your goals. This article helps you plan the use and usefulness before you purchase a web hosting plan.

Domain Name

One step before a hosting account, comes your domain name. You need to book or register a domain name which will point to your hosting space. The domain name will represent the name of your brand online. Domain names like bookbinder.com and tablerepair.net are self-explanatory and can bring the right visitors to your website. You can usually purchase a domain name starting from $5 to $100 depending on the name and its novelty. Hosting providers also sell domain names and sometimes may offer them free or at a discounted price along with their hosting packages. Availing of these offer bundles can help you save big bucks.

Website Design

Are you going to have a website for your domain name? Or are you going to use it only for email? If you are planning to have a website, it is essential that you do a bit of homework and know what it takes to make it successful. The purchase of web space and setting up the website design should go hand in hand so that neither the money spent on the designing or resources spent on the hosting account go waste. As soon as your design has completed the pilot testing stage and is ready to be put into production, it is ideal to purchase the web space.

Budget

If you don’t have a big budget, it’s very important that you draw out a plan for your website. Many companies jump into expensive software or online products, without knowing how to implement them or how to get their employees to start using them. A website or web app is no different. You can get a lot of off-the-shelf software which you can start using immediately, but do you really need it? How long will training and adaptation take? Will you be able to easily migrate your systems from old to new? All these are questions you need to ask yourself before you jump into buying it. If you haven’t planned properly, your purchase of web space and a domain name will go waste.

Email Accounts

What Should You Have Before You Buy Web Hosting Space?

What Should You Have Before You Buy Web Hosting Space?

If you are going to have email accounts for this domain name, it is best to plan out the email account details and the space that you plan to allocate to each account. This can be estimated from existing email traffic or you can simply choose the minimum limits and keep upgrading as your requirement increases regularly. Individual email accounts must be created with a password and quota setting. You can also plan out if you are planning to forward emails to another email address or domain name. Similarly, any internal email policies should be planned out before you jump in to purchasing web space.

Resource Usage

How much space you need is one of the most important questions that you should be prepared for when visiting the website of your favorite web host. Do you need additional features or resources from the beginning? Or can you upgrade your account later? It’s always a good idea to start off with a plan with the bare minimum resources that you need and then later upgrade in advance, incase you anticipate a higher requirement. Start with how much space your website actually takes up at the moment, almost all hosts will allow you to upgrade your plan on a pro rata basis and adjust the amount you have already paid, towards the upgraded plan.

A Simple Explanation Of What Big Data Is

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A Simple Explanation Of What Big Data Is

Big Data has become a new buzz word in the IT industry. Everyone is talking about it and repeatedly using it to impress others, even if they themselves don’t really know what it means. Big Data is often used out of context and more as a marketing gimmick. This article aims to explain what Big Data really is and how it will be useful in solving problems.

Physics and Mathematics calculations can give us the exact distance from the East Coast of USA to the West Coast, accurate to about 1 yard. This is a phenomenal achievement and has been applied to various technologies in our daily life. But the challenge comes in when you have data which is not static, which is constantly changing and changing at a rate and in volumes which are humongous to determine in real time. The only way we can process this data is by using computers.

IBM data scientists break big data into four dimensions: volume, variety, velocity and veracity. But there are many more aspects of Big Data. Big data can be described by the following characteristics:

Volume is the size of the data which determines the value and potential of the data under consideration and whether it can actually be considered as Big Data or not. Variety means that the category to which Big Data belongs to is also a very essential fact that needs to be known by the data analysts. This helps the people, who are closely analyzing the data and are associated with it, to effectively use the data to their advantage and thus upholding the importance of the Big Data. Velocity refers to how fast the data is generated and processed to be useful. Variability of the data can also be a problem for the analysts. Veracity is the quality of the data being captured. Accurate analysis depends on the veracity of the source data.

Analogies

An article on the Tibco Blog provided a very simple analogy to understanding what Big Data really is. Their blog says that:

“One analogy for Big Data analysis is to compare your data to a large lake… Trying to get an accurate size of this lake down to the last gallon or ounce is virtually impossible… Now let’s assume that you have built a big water counting machine… You feed all of the water in the lake through your big water counting machine, and it tells you the number of ounces of water in the lake… for that point in time.”

A better, more visual analogy is presented by Paul Lewis of Hitachi Data Systems. He often explains about Big Data by showing a picture cartoon filled with hundreds of people who are doing different things in the picture, looking busy. He explains:

“You need to find the person with the suitcase of money (Value)…but there are many people (Volume), all walking at various speeds running to work (Velocity), from all walks of life (Variety), some are crooks (Veracity).”

Importance and Benefits

One of the major reasons why we need Big Data is for prediction and analysis. One of the best examples where Big Data can be seen in action is the Large Hadron Collider experiment, in which about 150 million sensor deliver data 40 million times per second. After filtering and refraining from recording more than 99.999% of these streams, there are 100 collisions of interest per second. Another important example is Facebook, which handles over 50 billion user photos.

Healthcare is another area where Big Data can play a significant role. One of the most amazing example is Google Flu Trends, which analyses search data from various locations and uses the Big Data Analysis to identify patterns of Influenza epidemics and endemics around the world. Although this data is not necessarily accurate or may have a lot of false positives, it highlights the potential of what Big Data can show you.

A key benefit of Big Data is that there is no specific format in which it is stored. Crudely put, it is a raw dump of data i.e. it is unstructured. The system uses complex algorithms to classify and process this data, which makes it very special.

Would You Prefer Transparent Web Hosting To Unlimited Hosting?

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Would You Prefer Transparent Web Hosting To Unlimited Hosting?

Every consumer wants the maximum juice for his money. More space, more bandwidth, more databases and more of every other thing. But where do we draw the line? In reality, there is nothing like Unlimited Hosting Space, because the physical medium that the data will be stored on has a limit. You may call it scalable or even elastic, but it is surely not unlimited in the true sense of the word. Unlimited Hosting providers often give a clarification or explanation of the meaning of their Unlimited Hosting Plans and who they are meant for. This article discusses the trend of people avoiding unlimited plans and instead looking for transparent web hosting packages.

Clarity and Certainty

The most important reason why people prefer the vanilla shared hosting plans with clearly demarcated limits on space and bandwidth, is because those place offer more certainty and transparency. Giving defined limits and offering clarity of plans indicates that the provider aims to be more transparent and offer a fair deal. There are numerous Hosting Providers who aim to cut costs and try to serve as many customers as possible by using unethical means. The Unlimited Hosting plan was designed to tackle customers who haggle over the Price - Space ratio. By giving Unlimited Space, there is no further argument possible.

Resource Allocation

Resource allocation in Unlimited Plans is often skewed. While you may get “Unlimited” Disk Space or Bandwidth, your account will be restricted by other limits like Memory usage, CPU usage, Rate of Transfer and maybe even load time. This is pointless when your aim of taking an unlimited hosting plan is to be more ambitious and use more resources. Many providers put up a clear notification on their website, indicating that resources are not really Unlimited i.e. they are restricted to a maximum of 20 GB. In fact Big Rock India, a leading web host in India states on their website that

“….we have determined that anyone using over 20 GB of disk space is likely to be using our server as a backup device or to serve video content and such and that is not an acceptable use case for our shared hosting service. We have similar limits for other parameters.”

This is a primary reason, why people would prefer to take a 20 GB account rather than take an Unlimited Hosting account which ends up being the same price.

Better Pricing

Many a time, we don’t need a lot of space, but due to our consumerist mentality, we end up buying the bigger plan with more space - as much as we can hoard. This leads to us believing that we have got the maximum benefit for the payment we made. We never use all of the space and that is exactly the case for the bulk of users who buy the Unlimited Hosting Plans. A large number of buyers don’t do the math properly. Its probably just laziness rather than ignorance. They will purchase an Unlimited Hosting Plan at a higher price, when they only need about 1 GB of space, although the 1 GB plan is cheaper. The price and space illusion draws them into choosing the wrong plan. As people get smarter and realize that what they need is not Unlimited and they are able to clearly define their requirement,

Peace of Mind

In an Unlimited Plan, the user is always on tenterhooks that his account maybe throttled or get suspended for excessive resource usage. Some providers allow you to see the Resource Usage of your account, while others arbitrarily turn off your account or prevent it from using any further resources. As mentioned earlier, Unlimited Plans have skewed resources, which is why the chances of exceeding resources on them will always play on the minds of a professional user. A serious web designer or webmaster will never take an Unlimited Plan and will prefer to opt for a transparent plan which clearly defines the limits of the account.

Why Do People Hate Changing Their Web Hosting Provider? Even Bad Ones

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We hear many times about good clients who are still stuck to bad hosting services. We try to rationalize and investigate as to what is it that could be making their hosting provider so magnetic. In our quest for reason and understanding, we realized that not every client makes wise decisions. This article highlights some of the reasons why people hate to switch to a new host, even after experiencing mediocre or bad service with high pricing.

Resistance to change

In most large organizations, which have a lot of staff, there is often a resistance to change their system of working or even switching to a new system or new provider. The staff are already accustomed and have set themselves well into the old system and so have the managers and supervisors. A change in the system or in the way of working is pretty unnerving for many staff members, especially those who are elderly or who are new. Even managers don’t want the headache of re-training the staff and having to tolerate excuses due to lack of knowledge of the new system. This is true when companies switch their web hosting and data storage providers as well. This can easily be overcome with the appropriate training and maybe even counselling. The training will reassure the staff that they are switching to a more efficient and modern system.

Comfort Level

Once you have developed a congenial rapport with your web host, it is difficult to part ways, especially due to the friendship that has developed with the team. This may lead you to stick to a web host who overcharges you or gives your bad support. But due to the friendly relations, you would prefer to turn a blind eye rather than put your foot down and make the first move. This often leads to things becoming worse and the relationship becoming more like a hostage situation. It’s like the “Stockholm Syndrome” where you as the customer are sympathizing with your hostage taker i.e. the web host. Realizing this early can save your business a lot of money and also a lot of time spent with unproductive or inefficient systems. A client who recently switched to our service was hosted with a local provider for over 12 years. The local provider was his good friend and had helped him to setup the website initially. However, when he realized that the old web host had been charging him over $600 annually for a 10 GB account, he flipped over. Things got sour and they separated on an unpleasant note.

Lethargy

Many clients suffer their web hosting experience due to their own lethargy and laziness to switch. They procrastinate searching for a web host or claim that they are too busy with other things. What they don’t realize is that if they were to monetize their website and switch to a cheaper and more efficient web host, they may not only save money but make more money with the additional business. It’s more of mental lethargy rather than physical.

Lack of knowledge

Many elderly entrepreneurs who setup websites when no one even knew about them, are still stuck in that era. Those who were once pioneers in having an online portal are now subject of “How not to make your website” tutorials. This is usually due to their lack of knowledge that there are better and newer technologies available. The same old web hosting has been going on for ages. We were once studying a website for transferring to our services, when we realized that the version of IMAP running on that server was so old that the firm that did the coding had gone out of business since 10 years. The IMAP server was last updated in 1998 and has been stuck at the same version since then, oblivious of all the new viruses, vulnerabilities and threats that are existent. Online window shopping and even reading up on the latest in the hosting industry can surely help you decide when and how to upgrade your web hosting infrastructure.

Freebies

One of the silliest reasons that we have heard, for sticking to a bad web host was that the web host was giving some freebies bundled with the package. What were those freebies? Free clipart and free web templates. For those readers who have still not understood the silliness of the situation: You can get free clipart, free web templates and even a free website builder, without being bound to your hosting service or being subject to the mediocre support that they provide.

Doing a bit of research on Google could help you save a lot of money and also make your online presence more impactful for your business.