From web site launches to why you shouldn’t backup your PC to your digital hosting home.  This podcast has been in production for two weeks thanks to a slew of interruptions but I am happy to say finally the Web Hosting Show is back on the air.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 154!
Running Time: 16 minutes | File Size: 7.17 MB

Here are just a few topics from this week’s episode of the Web Hosting Show.

• What is Your IP and Why Do You Need It?
• Don’t Backup My Documents on Your Hosting Account!
• Checking Web Popularity with URLmetrix?
• Gawkwire, a new Internet and Hosting News Site Launches!

Podcast Exclusive - Part 2 of Our “How to Purchase a Web Hosting Business” Series with Web Strategist Errett Cord. Download the podcast to check it out!

Ever have one of those periods of time where it seems like nothing is going right?  Two weeks ago my main podcasting powerhouse of a machine was fried and I was still waiting to get it back from HP.  Last weekend, I had no power due to a line of wicked weather.  This week I am knocking on wood and tossing spill salt over my shoulder because thus far, nothing has interupted me.

Without monitoring, nobody would know what is happening with the web server you are on. Is PHP running? Does MySQL need to be restarted? You would be without direction just in case a bad situation popped its ugly head. As you can see server monitoring might be the most important part of the hosting business.

Now with shared hosting, monitoring is a given. Most people have no clue what is going on. They just know their Joomla install isn’t working and they want it fixed. With dedicated hosting though monitoring becomes more important because the web host you go with may or may not “hold you hand” in this regard.

The basic things you need to keep your eyes peeled on are HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3. Then you have other services that are second tier to that and you go down the line service by service.

There are services out there that will monitor for you. SiteUptime.com is one service that comes to mind. Another one that I would highly recommend would be Wormly.com. If you remember I had an interview about Wormly with its founder back on podcast 105. Shared, VPS or Dedicated, if you are not sure how, when, where and why your own web host does server monitoring you might want to ask.

What is the best way to manage multiple web sites with only one hosting account? That is the question Diane e-mailed to me a little earlier this week, and there are a few different ways you could get this done. Here is Diane’s dilemma.

I am a web designer and I have a bunch of little web sites. I’d like to have multiple web site hosting, so I can easily get in and work on my collection of little web sites.

Right now, I have each one hosted on its own account, so I have to ftp to one, do my thing, disconnect, ftp to the next one, do my thing, disconnect, etc. Also, I don’t want to spend a lot of money on the hosting for these little web sites because they are just little tiny web sites. Can you give me any advice on getting this type of web hosting? Thanks for help.

Now as I noted before there are several ways you could tackle this problem. Read more »

So you have a few friends or clients that need a web host, your pretty savy with the ins and outs of the web hosting world so why don’t you start up your own hosting company? Now many people might look at that and say that it is overkill - but becoming your own mini web hosting company is not so far fetched.

I Want One, What Is It?

So what is a reseller hosting account? If you want a dictionary definition, I would say a type of web hosting in which a person purchases a plan from the hosting company and then resell this plan to other customers.

Where do you find such hosting accounts? There are a lot of web hosts that offer good ones, you’ll just have to shop around. In many cases you will be given a large chunk of hosting space and bandwidth that you can cut up into smaller peices for all the domains you wish to host. You can think of it kind of like a dedicated server - except it is shared, and not so dedicated.

How Does it Work?

Once you have all your peices cut up - you can then turn around and sell this space to Tom, give this section to Molly and save that section over there for yourself. Each section gets its own control panel and acts like your usual shared hosting plan that you are probably more familiar with.

Now some companies take a different route with reseller web hosting. They will give you access to the master account, then you buy littler plans to stuff into your reseller hosting account as needed. If you need five hosting plans for five clients, you would go to them tell them you want a reseller plan with room for five and they will do the dividing up and setting up for you.

The nice thing about reseller hosting plans is if you actually resell to a large enough audience, the hosting plan can pay for itself. Down the line you might even upgrade that reseller account to a dedicated server where you could do all the same things but have more system resources to work with. Who knows, after that you might end up becoming your own web hosting company after all.

Web sites have been taking a grave turn from putting up photos of your grandmother’s cats to an explosion of social interaction, user create videos and even audio shows just like this one. With services like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and others ruling the Web world - there have been a lot of copy cats come up in the ranks as well.

What some people don’t realize is it takes a lot of web hosting power to run these titans of the new digital age. A web site like digg.com is not run on a $5.99 a month web hosting account. They probably have a whole farm of servers running that single domain.

Who Will Save the Day?

This is where deditated hosting companies come into play. Places like Rackspace and FastServers.net love this new growth because that means more people have reasons for purchasing more hardcore hosting accounts. So if that is the good news, then what is the bad news? Read more »

Love it or hate it, Windows hosting is here to stay.

Now there has been a great debate about Windows on the desktop for years. Should you use it? Should you switch? I would be willing to bet money though that you didn’t know the same fight existed in the web hosting world too. Unlike the desktop PC market, Windows is not on top. Linux really rules the roost in this world of server administration.

Where with a Linux-based server you have reliability, with Windows-based servers you have ease of use. As far as security goes, Linux is on top and with Windows your left patching holes left and right. On the range of price, Linux for the server is often cheap or free while Windows costs much more money than you really have to spend. Read more »

One sticking point in Web hosting that is hard for some people to wrap their heads around is server resources. Now this usually stand for the amount of CPU and RAM your Web site can use on the server that you are on.

So why is this such a confusing topic, and why do so many hosts not want to talk about it? Well, it might not be as taboo ask you might think.

Now as an example of what server resources means to you and me, think of it like your computer. Lets say you have ten programs open and running. You are browsing the Web, checking your E-mail, running a chat client, burning a DVD and more. Now running all those programs at once can be a little taxing to your machine if it is not powerful enough. Power for a computer (and for a server) is often measured by the CPU and RAM it has access to.

Now lets say your DVD burning program starts to go wild, it is using up so many resources that it slows the rest of your programs down to a crawl. What would you do? You’d shut down the DVD burning so your other programs could come back from a near death experience.

Now if you have a Web site that is using too many server resources, you could experience the same effect. On one server you have many Web sites hosted. Each one would be like a program, using it’s share of the server’s resources. If one uses too much, it is usually “turned off” so the other ones are not effected. A Web host can much easily deal with one mad customer. When you have an entire server filled with pissed off people, well - lets just say that is no fun at all.

Now how can you fix this? Well moving up in plan type can often give you more resources to work with (if you can not bring your resource use back down). Going from a shared hosting environment to a dedicated one can give you a fighting chance because a dedicated plan has a smaller amount of Web sites on it. What does that mean for you? It means you have more server resources to work with.

So why don’t Web hosts tell you how many of the server’s resources are available to you? It is because the number in most cases is very low. It isn’t exactly a good selling point, so they are not going to share that information with you.

Also many servers are setup differently.

Server number one might be able to take a little more punishment than server number two. So that makes it really hard for a Web host to give you an exact number. Most scripts and services you would install on a Web hosting account these days are really good at managing your resources for you so they do not get out of hand. Every so often though, you might run into an issue like this - so it is good to know before hand what your situation is so your not yelling at your host saying “Where did my Web site go?”.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 103!