For many clients just starting out with a website or a new business, a Shared Hosting solution or Virtual Private Server (VPS) is often enough to get off the ground. But, for many there comes a point when these solutions just aren’t enough.

The most obvious sign that it’s time for an upgrade is when your website has started regularly requiring more bandwidth or power than your current plan provides. Sure, this is kind of a no-brainer, but it’s a good idea to upgrade before you start running into trouble. If your site starts topping out the charts, it could temporarily go offline and that’s not good for business. Often we will see clients’ websites explode all of a sudden because they ran a special promotion or got some good press, and we will always work with them to make the transition to a dedicated server as seamless as possible. But, if you start seeing things getting busy, you can avoid a stressful situation with a preventative upgrade.

Another time an upgrade is a good idea is when a web application transitions out of beta or the development stage. While you’re working the bugs out of your application, a VPS can work fine. With just a few developers and beta testers in the system, a dedicated server would probably be overkill anyway. Once you release your application to the public, however, you’ll want to make sure you plan for the inevitable boom in traffic. Nobody wants their newly released project going down right out of the gate!

Regardless of the content of your website, if you’re worried about stability, dedicated servers are always the safest bet. Below you will find a summary of all the benefits a dedicated server provides (and how TurnKey Internet maximizes those benefits for our customers):

• Speed and Performance: Server and network response times in a shared hosting environment depend highly on the activity of others with whom you share space and resources. With a dedicated server you have significantly faster response and page load times because all the systems resources (such as CPU, disk, RAM and network bandwidth) are controlled and utilized solely by the applications on your server.
• Reliability: With a dedicated hosting environment, you have unlimited access to the operating system, server resources and software applications. This gives you a reliable way to manage the needs of your website and database system: it’s all there when you need it. If a neighbor causes a problem by over using resources, it will not impact your website or your business.
• Security: Dedicated servers provide better security than any other form of hosting since you are the only one with the root “administrative” access to your resources (disk, CPU, RAM, etc.) and can configure customized security policies server-wide such as firewall protection, user-level permissions and even restrict the types of applications that run on the server. With other forms of hosting, such as shared hosting, the neighbors you share space with could jeopardize the security of your web and database systems.
• Customization and Flexibility: Dedicated Servers offer unlimited customization and flexibility to meet your hosting application needs. You have access to fine tune and optimize all aspects of the server such as custom versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl/CGI or custom database configurations to suit your application needs, providing substantial performance gains over any other form of hosting. You maintain full root ‘administrator’ access to the server and can install, remove, or modify any applications you wish. If you need even more power behind your hosted application, TurnKey can customize your server with additional RAM, disk and bandwidth to suit your needs or provide you with advanced enterprise level solutions such as clustering, virtualization, load balancing and mirroring of your dedicated server.
• Easy-To-Use-Software: TurnKey Internet offers easy-to-use, pre-installed and pre-configured hosting applications for your web, database and mail system needs. If you know how to use a web browser, you are ready to use a TurnKey Dedicated Server with your choice of control panel, such as cPanel or Plesk. You can even select your choice of Operating System, such as Linux or Windows.
• Multiple Domains: Dedicated servers provide a cost-effective and management-friendly solution to multiple domain hosting. Rather than dealing with the burden of numerous accounts on shared hosting servers, you can host a virtually unlimited number of domains on a single dedicated server. With our server management software, it’s easy to create, manage and delete accounts whenever you want, and all from one interface.
• Worry-Free Operation: TurnKey Internet provides Fully Managed Solutions to ensure you don’t have to worry about your server and can keep your focus on running your business. From offsite backups to managed Firewall and Security monitoring, TurnKey takes care of everything for you.

As you can see, dedicated servers are the best solution for those that are serious about their website or business and want the assurance that hardware, software and resources are dedicated exclusively to them. If you are considering hosting numerous domains, a high traffic site, an e-commerce site, reselling hosting to others, have sensitive data contained in your site or simply want more speed, power and control, it’s time to upgrade to a dedicated server. For more information visit www.turnkeyinternet.net/dedicated-servers

When you are first getting started, a shared hosting plan is enough to help you meet your goals. It gives you a place on the web to collect leads, showcase your samples and sell your products and services. The problem with shared hosting, though, is that it comes with limited speed and storage space. Although it’s enough while your business is still small, you might want to think about upgrading as your business starts to grow. Many people have a hard time deciding when to make the switch, and if you can relate to this problem, then the following information will get you started in the right direction. You will learn about the benefits of using a VPS, but you will also get a clear picture of when to take action.

With most shared hosting plans, your performance can be impacted by the way that other people on the server use their resources. If someone else’s website is getting a lot of traffic or being attacked, then your website might slow down or even go offline for a while. If you depend on your site to generate sales, then this downtime is unacceptable. When your customers want to make a purchase, they are not always going to wait for your content to come online again. So any performance issues that you experience can hurt your profitability. A virtual private server, or VPS, will help you avoid that problem by providing you with exclusive resources. A VPS also enables your business to customize the performance resources and software based on your company’s unique needs. Things like Virtual CPUs, memory, and storage space, can all be customized and upgraded on a VPS. With shared hosting, you are limited to the software already installed on the server, and sometimes it may lack a requirement or feature your business needs. But with a VPS, you have full flexibility over which software your virtual server runs, even down to the Operating System.

Another downside of shared hosting is the lack of Administrative or root access to the server. This limitation affects what software you can install as well as the settings and options that you can configure on the server. This can greatly impact the potential of what you are able to do with your website.  However with a VPS, you do have root or admin access, giving you the ability to better monitor and troubleshoot your website, with full access to your virtual server’s logs. With a VPS, you have exclusive access and can dictate who shares that access. This allows you to better secure the contents on your server and alleviates the concerns of sharing a server with malicious or careless users. Also because you have full control over the virtual server, you can better enhance and customize its security based on your unique needs.

If you have decided that you need to upgrade, then consider it a good thing. Needing more resources means that your business is growing and that you are attracting plenty of new customers. Having a VPS will help you accommodate even more web traffic, and you will not need to worry about losing sales or customers due to downtime. The speed and performance of a VPS will also help you maintain a professional image, which will enhance and preserve your reputation.

Some business owners procrastinate when they need to upgrade their website, but doing so hurts them more than they likely suspect. Ensuring that your hosting plan is capable of meeting your needs is a vital factor when it comes to getting the most from your business, and you can get started right away.

But, before you select your VPS / Cloud Server Provider, there are 10 Questions you should ask first.

Back in September of 2010, we posted an article about IPV6, the new IP address protocol that may cause some real problems for online businesses. Here we are in the beginning of 2011, and the last of the IPv4 addresses have been released, and businesses still don’t seem too concerned about updating their properties. This could spell real disaster come September.

“It just isn’t No. 1 on the radar scope — good or bad, it just isn’t,” said Alan Shark, executive director of the Public Technology Institute (PTI), a nonprofit that focuses on using IT to improve government services. Why is this? Well, there have been a few scares over the past few years, times when we thought IPv4 would run out, but then innovative solutions staved off the inevitable for a little longer. This time, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting a reprieve, and people who are waiting for one should take a second look.

For those who don’t know, IP addresses are the numeric addresses assigned to every single solitary device that connects to the internet. That means personal computers, phones, iPads, routers, networked gaming consoles—everything. IPv4 addresses are compatible with other IPv4 addresses—they can communicate smoothly and without hiccups. However, IPv6 addresses are not necessarily so compatible. In order to make the two compatible, Internet providers need to upgrade their routing infrastructure, set up special software and configure their network to properly direct the new addresses. If your provider is doing this, you’re all set. If your provider isn’t doing this, you need to make sure they do, or find a new provider (just as an aside, TurnKey Internet is completely IPv6 compatible).

Some observers are making the comparison between the IPv6 scare and Y2K, the vastly out-of-proportion panic we all experienced before the turn of the millennium. “The computers will all go down at once,” they said. “It’ll be bedlam!” they cried. It wasn’t. Y2K was the technological community’s version of crying wolf, and its set us all up for trouble. It looks like a lot of federal agencies aren’t taking IPv6 seriously for this very reason, and their infrastructures may suffer the consequences.

Come September, you’ll be happy you investigated this back in February, as businesses race to update at the last minute or go down and lose customers, and glitches on government websites bring federal business to its knees. Hopefully there won’t be any real dangers to personal safety. Profits, on the other hand, are another story.

In this, the first of our new series, Ask the Experts, our President and CEO, Adam Wills, tackles our first question:

How can I choose a dedicated service web hosting company?

Take it away, Adam…

1) Work with a reputable, real company.

It may sound obvious that you should  be looking for a reputable, real company, but the reality is that  many of the web hosting companies that claim to be, aren’t.  There are thousands upon thousands of web hosting companies in existence today, many of which claim to offer dedicated servers.  However, the shocking truth is that many of them are 1-man operations that lack infrastructure, support and a positive track-record. So, the first step in choosing a dedicated server host, it to research the company that offers it. Visit the Better Business Bureau website. Look for an independently verified reputation. Make sure there is an organization in place to back up promises like service-level guarantees.

2) Purchase directly from the company that owns the hardware (i.e. do business directly with the datacenter and carefully review any businesses that are middlemen or resellers).

Many clients come to us on the heels of devastating experiences with other hosting providers. Often their websites just disappeared along with the supposed company they were doing business with. Here at TurnKey Internet, we support resellers. There are a great many excellent reseller companies with pristine reputations and wonderful customer service who have been in business for years. However, like with any business, there are plenty of not-so-reputable resellers out there too. When a reseller doesn’t pay his hosting bill with his provider, his servers get shut down. If your website happens to be on one of those servers, your website gets shut down too. The best way to avoid this is by researching your reseller or, better yet, by going directly to the source– the web hosting company that owns their own infrastructure and datacenter. You will not only get the piece of mind an established, brick-and-mortar business provides, you will also get a better price by cutting out the middleman.

3) Work with companies that offer a large selection of the latest technology.

A wide variety of the latest server hardware and models is a sign of the health and longevity of a dedicated server provider. For instance, today the hot CPU chips for entry level and mid-range dervers are the Quad Core Intel i5 and i7. The high-end and enterprise-level CPUs are typically the multi-CPU configured, Quad Core Xeon E550x series. Make sure the company you choose has these products available.

4) Make sure the company you choose has a wide range of support and backup options.

Most web hosting companies will claim to have top-notch support. You should always try before you buy. Test phone numbers and live chat and note response times. Also, make sure the company offers a premium managed support and backup service option. If a company is not able to offer options like server hardening or firewall setup, it is a sign that company is not a full-fledged dedicated provider. While you might not need to take advantage of these services at the start, it is always good to know they are available, should you need to upgrade in the future.

Here at TurnKey Internet, we go out of our way to help potential clients feel comfortable. We always offer all the latest technology and we take time to explain who we are and why what we offer is unique.  We display our better business bureau A+ status and independent reviews right in the footer of all our web pages. We provide links to news organizations that have written stories about our company, and in general try to help potential clients understand the all that we offer. Whether you choose TurnKey Internet or another established web host (and we hope you choose us!) doing a little research can save you lots of heartache and ensure that you have a positive  hosting experience.

Adam Wills
President and CEO