The business of being green
The business of being green
Does your business take green IT seriously? Well it should, because ignoring climate change could cost you money and harm your credibility. There are now over 1.1 billion computers in operation worldwide, collectively producing about one billion tonnes of CO2 through their electricity requirements. E-waste is serious headache too with computers, mobile phones and electronic gadgets now accounting for 5% of the world’s garbage (www.unep.org). But surely small IT companies don’t need to be worrying about that kind of thing? Actually, they do - there are solid reasons why all businesses should be going greener, and not just because of the do-gooder’s warm fuzzy feelings to be had! Over 70% of PCs will not be recycled when disposed of over the next five years, and globally we will dispose of 512 million. We are now legally obliged to dispose of PC equipment properly, and that normally incurs charges. Thankfully there is a free and simple, if underused, alternative; lots of people in the world are in dire need of our “outdated” computers, so donate them to the likes of www.computeraid.org. For safety, I would suggest you scrub your drives first (try dban.sourceforge.net). More regulation info at www.netregs.gov.uk. Perhaps more importantly, consumers and businesses are increasingly taking note of how the products and services they use impact the environment. Memset (www.memset.com) became the UK’s first “carbon neutral” Web host last Summer and that has definitely helped us win more business, which is also probably why so many other dedicated server hosts are following suit. Carbon offsetting Things like travel, electricity usage and product manufacture have a “carbon footprint”; the quantity of greenhouse gases directly or indirectly produced as a result of those activities. Most activities are impossible to make 100% green, but you can offset the effective carbon impact by investing in carbon sequestration projects (eg. planting trees) or in greener power generation facilities (eg. wind farms), thus becoming “carbon neutral”. Organisations like the CarbonNeutral Company (www.carbonneutral.com) and the Carbon Trust (www.carbontrust.co.uk) can guide you through offsetting, and it is neither expensive nor difficult. For example, an average small office with 10 staff might have equivalent emissions of 20 tonnes CO2/year, which would probably only cost around 200/year to offset. As well as giving you more credibility in today’s increasingly enviro-friendly world, taking a few hours to review your carbon footprint can lead to some worthwhile cost savings as well. A simple example is turning off (or hibernating if, like me, you hate rebooting and getting back to where you were each morning) your PC at night. A recent study by Fujitsu estimated that the UK alone wastes 123m on electricity powering PCs left on out-of-hours. See www.energysavingtrust.org.uk for general energy-efficiency tips. Virtually greener Carbon offsetting is all good stuff, but when it comes to IT power consumption, prevention is better than cure. Demand for high-availability, centralised server resource is growing relentlessly, and high-density computing uses a lot of energy. Even a base-spec 1U rackmount server will burn 100-200 Watts continuously, and once you fill a few racks and add in cooling requirements you are looking at a whopping electricity bill! With energy prices doubling every few years datacentres’ power consumption is fast becoming a major issue for IT business, and is now the main cost underlying server hosting. The oddity from our perspective is that the vast bulk of servers in our datacentres idle most of the time, with perhaps 90% never getting close to full capacity. While many applications are best hosted on their own dedicated server (better security, for example), few need the full resource of a modern multi-core, gigahertz machine. That is where virtualisation comes in; the latest generation of virtual machines, using the hardware-assisted virtualisation in new AMD and Intel’s chips (eg. www.vmware.com, www.miniserver.com), are operationally indistinguishable from a physical server but use 5-20% of the electricity. The reduced power and hardware costs give you significant savings while not costing anything you actually needed in the first place, and at the same time you are tackling climate change. It can be argued that all such measures are a dribble in the ocean, and some have serious doubts about the efficacy of our whole approach to climate change. However, being more climate-friendly is not difficult for most IT businesses and almost certainly helps, so can you really afford to ignore the risks, or miss out on the benefits of going greener? Article written by Kate Craig Wood
The oddity from our perspective is that the vast bulk of servers in our datacentres idle most of the time, with perhaps 90% never getting close to full capacity. While many applications are best hosted on their own dedicated server.
The Benefits of Affordable Web Hosting Posted By : king123
Presently web hosting providers comes with the packages with a ton of disk space, bandwidth and unlimited emails.
Web site hosting services
Choosing a reliable web hosting service provider for your web site could be a real challenge. Web hosting market is supersaturated with all those web hosting companies that appear and disappear each other day, throwing a shadow on web hosting industry in general. It is very hard to choose and indeed to find reliable web hosting service provider and for this, you should consider a range of things such as functional peculiarities of web hosting provider, its stability, reliability, and secure work of its web servers. How does the process of placing your web site in the Internet look like? Web site hosting represents the final stage of your web site development, at this you choose the place where your website will live . Surely the best way will be to choose paid web hosting services. It is necessary if your web site is important for you and it is even more important if your web site is commercial or business project. You may get Linux web hosting services or web hosting on any other server platform, for example Windows. You get professional technical service, fast speed of your website load, you will not be liable to place any advertising materials of web hosting company on it. More over, if you chose paid web hosting service, the visitors of your website will trust you more than if you chose free hosting service. So here there could be two possible situations: 1) You already have your own web site and domain name registered and your website was hosted elsewhere previously. You decided to transfer your existing web site to any other web-hosting provider. What should you do now? And how to shorten downtime of your website (the time when your website will not be available in the WWW? When you have already chosen your future web-hosting provider you should: a) Choose if you will transfer domain name registration service to your new provider or will keep domain name management at your registrar place; b) If you want to manage web hosting and domain name registration service from one place reassure that the chosen web hosting provider accepts domain name registration transfer; c) Ask web-hosting provider about its name servers. Now after you purchase web-hosting account you may start to place your web site. We recommend changing name servers for your domain name at once since name servers change will require DNS update and this may take from 24 to 72 hours. During this time your web site will not be available to public view via its name. But, with web hosting account we will provide you with dedicated IP address and can start to manage your website and upload your web site content (via FTP client software for instance) via IP address assigned to your domain name. 2) The second situation takes place when you have just taken decision about on-line presence. With web hosting account we will provide you with professional web site builder that will allow you to build your web site in about 30 minutes. To place your web site in the web you should register a domain name and upload your website to the web server (if you have made it in FrontPage or if you have your web site files on your hard disk) or publish web site of you made it using site builder. Please note that domain name registration will take about 24 hours and when they expire you can access your site via its name. In the meantime your website should be fully functional and accessible via IP address assigned to your domain name.
Anna Berk - CRM director of Eskhosting - <a href=http://www.eskhosting.com>reliable web hosting services provider</a> Eskhosting provides shared web hosting services on Linux platform with custom plans available. You get free setup, free ssl certificate, free domain name registration for a year. PHP 5 and 4 support, MySQL 5 support.
Easy tips for web hosting and domain name registration
As an average internet user, i’m surely you have already heard and know about the term domain name. This will not probably mean too much but without web hosting and domain name registration, people will surely have a hard time browsing through the internet. The web hosting and domain name registration can be compared to how the telephone system is used be the people. In fact, the telephone is one main element why we have Internet connection. Phone lines and without web hosting and domain name registration have a lot in common except that it is quite based on some electronically procedures.
What companies can do with a website?
Surprisingly, even in this era of technology, many people are unaware of a company’s potential benefits of having a website. It does not matter what is the size of a company when it comes to having a website, which can help companies excel universally. This article will briefly discuss the endless possibilities of a company website. If a company is specialized in producing certain goods, then having a website can be immensely beneficial. Over the past few years, selling stuff over the internet has become extremely popular. Online shoppers are now interested in virtually everything. They not only buy expensive gadgets through the internet, but also tiny cheap ones if the price is right. One will be astonished to learn that these shoppers are millions in number and will be even more in the next few years. Even if a Web Hosting India company only sells others’ goods over the internet, it can still make huge profit through commissions and service charges. Hence it should be crystal clear by now that a seller company can excel radically with the aid of a website. Companies can also use their websites to impress potential customers and other parties. A suave website with a brief yet attractive company profile is sure to attract visitors who eventually begin to have a positive attitude towards the particular company. Using a highly functional website, a company can definitely edge out its competitors in the race of getting attention. Customers will obviously want to contact companies which have a professional looking website complete with every contact details. Furthermore, a website helps a company to showcase its experience and experienced workforce through a vivid online presentation at a minimum cost. Companies can use website to give feedbacks efficiently and quickly. While manually giving feedback can be a slow and hectic process, online feedback is said to be very effective yet snappy. Previously, it was seen that customers are unhappy with a lot of companies as they were unable to give feedbacks on time. Furthermore, the quality of those feedbacks were said to be sub-standard most of the time. However, with the introduction of online feedbacks, complaints diminished significantly. A company can use the forums of a website to give these feedbacks in a nice manner. Companies can give more attractive advertisements by using a website. It is possible because a potential customer is most likely to notice lucrative offers online rather than offline. Companies can also be benefited financially by having a website. Small-scale companies can display tiny advertisements of other companies in their webpage to make money. These advertisements are too small to notice, yet they have the capability to draw a lot of money for the website-owner company. A company can also place vital payment information in their website which will let the visitors know how to pay in case a transaction occurs. Some companies even offer the customers a very easy payment procedure through the website which is getting popular day by day.
Abdul Vasi is a Marketing Expert specialized in Internet Marketing, His <a href="http://www.hostcats.com">Web hosting India</a> Company <a href="http://www.hostcats.com">Hostcats </a> provides you with reliable but affordable web hosting solution for your online business.
How To Choose A Website Host & Domain Name
This may come as a surprise: Some web site hosting services don’t have software to help you build a site! Some that do, don’t allow you to input HTML. You may want to add in small scripts that jazz up or protect your site such as ‘No Right Click’ or upload downloadable .exe files etc. There are some great web site tools out there that you’ll want to use! This article will give you things to look for when deciding on a host, domain or getting a better one than you have now. 1. Try them out q(^.^)p A good hosting service will allow you to use their services for free for a limited time or at least a demo. If they don’t have either, hah, get out of there. You need to check out the graphics, templates etc. Do you like them? If you don’t like what they have you’ll find yourself spending time searching and finally buying templates and graphics from someone else. Try them out first. Do they offer one of those fancy splash or flash pages? Not a real necessity but hey, I want one. Some are great and some not. Do they suit the real me
Check out their collection of bells and whistles. Good for impressing your friends and visitors. Those templates, graphics, splash pages, bells and whistles let your site give you professionalism, but can you completely change the look of your site with one or two clicks? 2. Ask dumb questions (@_@) When you consider joining any web hosting service that allows you to use their state of the art web page building services, you are going to have questions! There is nothing more frustrating than being in a hungry hurry to get your web site together and not being able to do it. This, will waste your late nights and weekends in a big way. Make sure the service is quick and friendly to answer your questions, no matter how silly they may seem. As easy as user friendly software is, it’s sometimes difficult to understand at first, (bit like, “Where’s the salt? “In front of you . For example I wanted to upload an .exe file and the software told me I couldn’t (like most free hosting services do). I questioned my host and found that I was uploading in the wrong place
If you are like me, you are going to have great questions and some real hah hah funny ones. You need a hosting service that will treat each question equally and give you the exact easy steps to follow. You don’t want high tech jargon or inadequacy to add to the problem. Until you get a good hold of how every great thing works you will have a lot of questions I’m sure. Good customer service is a must. Try them by asking a question, even a silly one
3. Traffic to your site (^^ (^^ Without traffic to your great site, especially a business site, you won’t have much joy. A bit like wetting your self in a wet suit, feels nice and warm to you but nobody notices
Does the web hosting service offer ways to get traffic to your website? Or are they letting you wonder off in search of paying some other service to provide you with traffic? It’s easier to have everything in the same place. 4. Get a good domain -(^.^)/ What’s in a name? The shorter the domain name the more valuable. A domain name that is easy to remember is easy to find. A domain name that won’t be misspelled helps. A good domain name should reflect the contents of the site or be of a general non restricting nature. Domain names are property. You may want to sell it one day. Some domain name registering services only register domain names and don’t have a hosting service. This means you will have to move your domain to a domain hosting service. This takes time and is a waste of your time. You are better off buying your domain name from your hosting service. According to a new report from Verisign, 4.6 million new domain names were registered in the second quarter of 2004, representing a 2.5 percent growth over the first quarter, 2004. In all, worldwide domain name registrations reached a peak of 64.5 million domain names, a 7 percent increase over end of year 2003. The domain name rush is on. 5. What’s in a host (?_?) Choosing a hosting service is like getting a present, the wrapping and the size are not often much of an indication of what’s inside. Which would you prefer: (A) Giving someone $100 to buy you a present or (B) Taking $100 and choosing your own present? I prefer to know what I’m getting! This is why I recommend getting a hosting service that will give you a no obligation trial period. A trial period that gives you full use of their service without any tool, template etc, limitations. 6. How to get your monthly hosting for free ($_$) You may also be surprised to hear that I don’t pay my hosting service! They pay me, each month. I prefer it that way and I’m sure you will too. If possible, I only use services that have an affiliate program. This meaning that if I introduce a couple of friends to the service I can get it for free or eventually have the hosting service send me money each month. I’m sure you’d also like that possibility. In conclusion, there are many places to where you can buy a domain name, let’s get a good short one. Building your website can be heaven or hell so go with a company that has the tools to let you do it easily and with customer service to answer all your questions quickly. Be sure they have a system to supply your site with traffic, lots of visitors. Be sure to try their web site building tools before they bill you. If you enjoy your hosting service and feel them worthy of introduction to your friends then the hosting service may become your bank accounts best friend. Read on: Read More MLM Secrets At http://mlmbuff.com Get A Free Downline At http://brymer.mybigsuccess.com Free Radio Downline At http://www.internet-radio-download.com
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Understanding web hosting data transfer Posted By : WebHostingGeek
If you know exactly what you are going to do with your web hosting account, you can then have a pretty good idea of how much bandwidth you are going to need. The term Bandwidth can be referred to the quantity of data that flows across a network wire in a given time period.
Choosing Between Free Web Site Hosting And Paid Posted By : Lucas Heijn
There are advantages and disadvantages with everything in life. The same could be said for free or paid web site hosting. The advantage of free hosting is of course that it is free. This sort of hosting such as GeoCities is great for personal and family sites.
New Futures to Website Design - Development - Hosting - SEO Posted By : Suresh Nair
This article is all about website development, optimization and web hosting features. Find great job opportunities in SEO, Programming and other IT fields. Learn to create information-rich site using latest programming scripts.
High Traffic Sites: How to Select a Web Host
Getting a site a great deal of traffic is no simple matter, likewise, neither is finding a hosting company for a site that is well promoted. When you ve spent the time to drive traffic to a website, the last thing you want is for that website to go down. As the old saying goes, time is money, and the right web host can make a big difference when it comes to your site. It is the intention of this article to provide information regarding what sort of options a good web hosting company will provide to a high traffic site.
First, a few definitions:
Availability: The status of your site s network. Is it up and running, or has there been a failure and it is down? Meaning, can your network handle a failed device?
Performance: The speed at which an application will respond to a user request. Meaning, can your network handle a lot of traffic?
There are four main technologies that can be used to improve availability and performance:
- Load Balancers hardware price range ($3,000 - $30,000)
- Web Accelerators hardware price range ($10,000 - $60,000)
- SSL Accelerators hardware price range ($1,000 - $50,000)
- Traffic Compressors hardware price range ($9,000 - $50,000)
As you can see, these technologies can be quite expensive, which can translate into high maintenance costs from your web host. And much like strapping a jet engine onto the back of my Ford Fusion probably isn t a good idea; neither is buying a $60,000 web accelerator for your simple brochure site. So, in order to choose between what is necessary and what is overkill, here is what you ll need to know:
Load Balancers
Load balancing for a web application is a great tool for both availability and performance. A Load Balancer stands in front of the web servers, creating a virtual address to which the client connects. It then distributes traffic evenly over the web servers to reduce the load on any single server. If one of the web servers is not available, the Load Balancer will detect the failure and reroute the traffic to all of the remaining available servers. It also provides a layer of security by hiding the real IP addresses of the application servers.
Who Needs it:
- High bandwidth utilization sites.
- Sites with constant traffic where availability is key
- Example: A high traffic Adwords site (thousands of unique visits daily; ads need to be available at all times)
Load Balancers on a Budget
If you must have a load balancer but can t really afford the separate appliance option, there is software available that will do the trick for a fraction of the price. This solution is not as efficient or robust as the hardware solution, but still affords the benefit of availability and is better than not employing a load balancer at all.
Web Accelerators
Web Accelerators use technologies such as caching and compression to deliver data to a large user community faster. It mitigates pressure on your system by storing data that otherwise will be transmitted repeatedly and delivering it straight from the cache.
Who needs it:
- Heavy-traffic, database driven sites that deliver web applications
- Sites with a global audience
- Example: Epson.com (database driven, over 1 million vistors/day from around the world)
SSL Accelerators
SSL Accelerators, also like Load Balancers, stand in front of application servers. They handle the encryption and decryption of a secured communication and eliminate the need for multiple SSL (Secured Socket Layer) certificates, reducing the load on your web servers as well as the administrative costs of SSL certificates. An SSL Accelerator can be purchased as a module, meaning a smaller piece of equipment that can be plugged into the primary appliance consolidating your equipment.
Who needs it:
- Sites who s pages are predominantly secured (Banks, Insurance, etc)
- Heavily trafficked ecommerce sites
- Inefficient shopping carts.
- Example: Fabric.com (Thousands of daily visitors; Shopping cart exists on multiple servers)
High Availability
For best availability, your web host should offer all of these solutions on High Availability (HA) packages. HA is the ability to have two or more appliances that are failover capable such that if one of the appliances becomes unavailable the other picks up the load.
With HA, you can eliminate the risk of a single point of failure in your network.
Overall
Most of these technologies are more efficient and easier to maintain when implemented at the hardware level. The appliances can be pricy, but you can find good deals on refurbished and second hand equipment. Support is also quite expensive so keep it in mind.
When it comes to availability redundancy is key. It is highly recommended that your host give you the option for all applications to run on at least two servers. If you can t afford two servers, make sure you re constantly backing up your data someplace else!
When it comes to performance, it s all about hardware. Here are the fundamental elements that will make your systems run faster:
- Processors (CPU) with the highest speed (the latest and greatest)
- Lots of memory with the fastest bus (RAM) (2 GB ” 128 GB)
- A reliable Internet Service Provider (ISP) with the latest routing technology and a solid network
Finding a web host that can create a highly available and performance driven network is a daunting task for any webmaster regardless of budget. These recommendations hopefully have given insight into how anyone can achieve excellent results in performance, and what sort of hosting upgrades can be made to super-charge your site. Keep informed of new technologies and try to find a knowledgeable partner that is willing to do the research for your business.
Carlos Aguilera is an employee of Objectware, an <a href= http://www.objectwareinc.com/WebHosting.aspx >Atlanta Web Hosting Company</a> and <a href= http://www.objectwareinc.com >Atlanta Web Development Company </a>with an active branch in Washington DC. Carlos is a Cisco Certified Network Associate, and Cisco Information Security Specialist that manages the Web Hosting and Internal IT needs of Objectware, Inc.