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Suspend or not to Suspend?

Suspend or not to Suspend?

As a web hosting provider, we do not normally suspend an account or a web hosting user even the subscription has expired. We will write to the subscriber if he or she wishes to continue.

However, we suspend a website if it has violated our terms severely and authorities have stepped in and given instruction to us to do so. Otherwise, we will try our best not to suspend a website or web hosting subscription.

Not long ago, a reseller has come to me. He asked me if I can help him, 2 of his customers’ web hosting account were suspended. Since it is not hosted at Vastspace, I cannot help him.

A suspended account means your provider temporarily stopped your web hosting service. The service refers to your website and all email services. It means at this point, you will see suspended messages at your website and you cannot access your emails and mailboxes.

We understand the consequences, only if we have a good reason to do that. The most common is spamming from a vulnerable website or a compromised email account.

We have root access to the server, we will be able to trace if it is a website or a compromised email account used to spam. For the website, you can temporarily unpublish the website and update it with a new password for the compromised email account. This will stop spamming usually.

For this kind of scenario, you do not have to suspend the affected account. You write to them on this incident after you mitigate the spamming. Affected users can continue to use their email service even the website is disabled for spamming.

You can see the differences here. You can be paying less or more but handling such incidents are important. If you are operating a business, and your email is handicapped. In other words, you have to stop doing business during the suspended period.

 

 

Why Premium Shared Hosting?

Why Premium Shared Hosting?

Many asked why Vastspace has premium shared hosting? Basically, this is how we have differentiated the ordinary shared hosting with the premium one. Why premium?

The ideal of marketing shared hosting is affordable. We see 2 groups of customers have chosen shared hosting. The beginners or the first-timers and the budget users. However, we decided to break the tradition and give more in shared hosting are things like protection and anti-spam.

Today, users are smarter and they know the cyberworld s vulnerable. Attacks come in many ways. They can penetrate from your website, the server, and the most via emails. There are the 3 areas are publicly accessible and it could be vulnerable to outdated software or codes.

Thus, protection in these areas is important. If you do not protects these places, it is like opening the doors to someone and asking them to steal things from you. When you have realized your belonging is stolen, it might be too late.

We have understood the reasons, we designed the premium shared hosting with adequate protection at a reasonable price. So, customers can enjoy the protections at a smaller price tag. In the past, they might be spending a few thousand dollars to enjoy the same but with the premium shared hosting, we change things. 

 

Limitations on Cheap web hosting

Limitations on Cheap web hosting

Limitations on Cheap web hosting

Some call it shared hosting and some call it cheap web hosting. Whatever you call them, they are sharing one server and costs only a few dollars each month or higher on some plans are given with more resources.

The main reason they are cheap because you can host many websites on one server. In order to do this, providers allocate lesser resources to cheaper web hosting plans using control panels or add-ons.

There are limitations on these web hosting plans. Please make sure your website can work with these limitations. Here are the common restrictions on cheap web hosting.

The restricted amount of resources – This could be the major limitation using cheap web hosting. Apparently, there is the addon to the server to restrict the amount of processing power and RAM to the type of web hosting plan you have subscribed.

Restricted Traffic – You are given large disk space but limited to the traffic given to you each month. If you have exceeded the traffic allocated, either you will have to pay a fee for more traffic or cause the website to suspend.

Fair usage policy – Never miss those fine prints or usage policy on these web hosting. Because these web hosting plans are cheap, there are rules and policies to restrict the usage of these web hosting. Especially when you are seeing these 2 words “unlimited” and unmetered” there are true meaning behind them.

Rate limiting and Forwarding on Email – The cheaper web hosting will also limit you on the number of emails sent per hour and you are not allowed to forward emails to mail account from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc. I felt that the forward restriction is a good practice though. Whether it is a shared server or dedicated server. Forward of emails to these mail account can cause your mail server IP blacklisted as these email providers have a stringent anti-spam policy. However, the limitation on how many emails sent per hour might not work for some business, for example, a logistics company or similar in nature, an insurance company etc.

This limitation will affect daily business operation. You might be losing more money from saving a few ten dollars each month. Thus, it is important to understand when you are getting a cheap web hosting if it has fitted into your needs.

Vastspace provides you with the web hosting consultation at no extra fee. Our mission is to help you to identify which type of web hosting is suitable for the website. The idea is to save time and probably save money.

 

 

Cheap web hosting?

Cheap web hosting?

Cheap Web Hosting

What is cheap web hosting? What is the cheapest? In my definition,  cheap web hosting is referring to shared hosting.

Web hosting providers are usually put a lot of websites with big capacity hard drives and they share one control panel. Because of sharing, the more websites on one server, the costs of each server is lower if you are hosting more customers.

The major disadvantage of these cheap web hostings is they are slow once populated. However, if the service providers are nice enough to limit the amount of the websites and put better resources like RAM or powerful CPU.

After all, the idea is to sell it cheap and it does the job. Many go for this type of cheap web hosting. There are 3 groups of the customers will go for cheaper web hosting.

The first type is the reseller.  Resellers usually sell web hosting together with other related services like web design, local IT service etc. The choose shared hosting because they have a bigger margin and easier to sell.

The second type is the customer knows little about web hosting. They are recommended by a friend or the low price of the plan has attracted them.

The third type is the customer knows what they want. It is for a simple website and a few email account. The group of customers have set aside a small budget for web hosting.

If you are getting a web hosting, I suggest you read up and understand the different type of web hosting. Understand more from each web hosting provider. Having said that, the salesman on the other side might know as little too.

So, it is a good idea you spend a little time to understand what you need. The cheaper web hosting is definitely not for an organization with a few hundred mailboxes or a database application for a group of filthy people. I will share more on how you are limited by these cheap web hosting on my next topic.

 

Beg to differ

Beg to differ

SEO2

It was sometimes ago asking myself, web hosting is behaving such for the last decade, is it time for a change? Web hosting basically transformed for the past few years but horizontally I supposed. We can see virtualization in many ways, storage has become larger etc.

Wait for a second, we are talking about its technologies but why do you need all these if you are getting them the same amount of customers. How do we increase the population in this pool?

Yes, the website must be there to draw online audiences. Now, the question is on how? I dive in and found myself the answer, online marketing.

Online marketing has become so important for web presence. However, it is neglected by many businesses. I personally feel that the economy in Singapore is restricted or we can say the resource is limited.

To expand this area, the fastest way is doing it online. Everything comes with a cost, they aren’t free. Either you invest in sacrificing more personal time or more money spent.

There are the cheaper method or the more expensive method doing it. I reckon that getting people to do it is the most expensive but you will spend less personal time and more effective.

I found backlinks from the reputable website has been effective. This especially for owners with a tight budget. Backlinks help in a way but your website content and complied to search engines is relatively important.

There are many site auditing tools to help you with this. They might cost you money but I think these expenses are quite reasonable.

At Vastspace, we have the knowledge on this to share with. Even results vary. But it is definitely better than you wait for the search engine bots to dig your website content or your online visitors have noticed your website.

What web hosting plan is right for you?

What web hosting plan is right for you?

There are a few types of web hosting. The basic one is known as shared hosting, VPS, cloud hosting and server also known as bare metal. Basically, two things affect your choice, the budget and what do use it for.

In my opinion, understand the different types of web hosting is important. This will help you with a realistic budget to a web hosting. What is a realistic budget?

I call it a realistic budget because the prices can differ a lot between plan A and plan B. For example, shared hosting is 200 a year bu a bare metal server is 200 a month. There is a huge difference in price. Here’s the question, do you need a dedicated server? Or do you just need a simple web hosting for you to publish a simple website and create a few mailboxes?

We do not anticipate a startup buying a server unless you are running a campaign and you are expecting huge traffic like an auction website or similar. These websites have greater returns and revenue generated from the website, hence the cost is justifiable.

Some choose to run their campaign with a smaller scale server like the VPS or the cloud hosting. VPS behaves like a server but with little resources. Because VPS and cloud hosting are scalable, it is good for those have an uncertain amount of traffic at the start.

I suggest base on your requirement to set your budget. It is not possible to buy a server at a shared hosting price. Don’t laugh, we have spoken to customers with such perception. Basically, they have a faint idea on web hosting. So, it is important to research and know the differences between different types of web hosting.

A Snapshot vs a Backup

A Snapshot vs a Backup

Many have not understood what is a snapshot? What are the differences? Which is better? Today, we are here to explain to you the differences, the pros and cons of the backups and the snapshots.

Snapshot is only available to a VM. Whether they are called VPS or something else. If the instance is virtualized, a snapshot is possible. Backup is installing an agent into the guest OS or the dedicated server, transfer the partition or files into a backup storage device.

Snapshot takes an image of the instance of its current state and dumped into a compressed file format like LZO. It is only possible to restore the entire VM. to restore files, you will have to extract files after you have restored the VM to another instance which is very time-consuming.

However, you can restore files from a backup. Even a bootable partition for some backup solutions. To restore a partition, you must have a temp portable partition on the memory to restore the restored bootable partition backup. This is a very slow process especially the restoration involved a huge partition.

Files restoration is the fastest and if you need to roll back the entire server, a snapshot restoration is much faster than restoring a bootable partition. However, if your backup retention is longer, you will need lesser space on your backup devices.

Most snapshot use NFS. It is cheaper to build an NFS storage than a proprietary backup solution. Nowadays, VM snapshot uses LVM-Thin to conserve disk space, it helps reduce disk space usage significantly. There is a drawback using LVM-Thin, the server must have a faster write and read space especially restoration, otherwise, it will affect the speed on other guest machines on the same server.

Why some go for shared web hosting?

Some might ask, why are they going for shared web hosting? While VPS at vastspace is so cheap and you get dedicated IP and services. Unlike the shared web hosting, everything is shared and you are paying extra for a dedicated IP. There are many reason why shared web hosting is better than VPS.

  • You don’t need a dedicated IP.
  • Less budget.
  • Cannot estimate the incoming traffic.
  • Managed and updated by web hosting provider.
  • Do not need the knowledge to operate a VPS.
  • You are not sending emails, shared IP may get black listed easily.
  • You want to use shared resources, so you can stretch when you need more for less populated and powerful server. May not the case while many web hosting provider can limit your resources especially in Linux.

How to schedule a backup Job on Cloud Server

Each Cloud Server comes with 2 free backup instances at no cost regardless of backup size. Additional backup instances can be ordered at only $10 /monthly. This is a useful feature to customers make changes to their files often and requires a rollback in case of any mishaps.

To perform a manual backup and scheduled backups are very easy tasks with our control panel, just a few clicks away and the hassle-free backup feature will send you an email notification if whether the backup is successful or unsuccessful that requires attention and rectification.