What are you do do, when you have a dedicated hosting plan and you don’t seem to have your bandwidth in sync?  I read about a problem recently where somebody was having their web host’s number and the numbers cPanel were giving them fighting each other and being different.  That is no fun for any dedicated web hosting client.

Could it be cPanel’s Fault?

Since cPanel is not able to calculate all the traffic passed from or to your server,  as a first step, I would recommend installing a 3rd party script (simple one working via iptables can be helpful) or program to gather the bandwidth stats to check whose calculations are indeed wrong. For example, exploits running on the server might be the cause of excessive bandwidth consumption being invisible for cPanel. So let that be a quick little lesson for you.

Final word on it is, get a second opinion.

I hope that little dedicated hosting ‘bit of knowledge is helpful for all who might learn from it.

In the web hosting world, disk space would be the amount of room you have to store your data.  Now on a dedicated hosting platform, in comparison with a virtual or shared hosting platform, you are going to have more disk space to use.  Some of the types of files that take up disk space are:

• Files
• Images
• Scripts
• Web-based email
• Databases
• and more

When shopping for web hosting, you need to find out how much disk space are you getting, how much will it cost to get more, and then find the best deal that matches your budget.

Thanks to more competition and better server side technology, web hosting disk space has gotten rather cheap, and has grown in abundance.  Finding the right dedicated hosting plan to meet your disk space needs should not be hard, however it is a good thing to be aware of. 

The team at Lunarpages has released one heck of a nice dedicated hosting plan.  The new Super Saver dedicated hosting plan has a lot to love.  Some of the features included are an 80GB hard drive, 500 GB of bandwidth, and a guarantee of 512 MB RAM. 

If you are on a budget, this is the plan to pick up.  With prices as low as $79 per month, what is not to love?  This dedicated hosting offering also comes in three remarkable flavors:

• Linux (CentOS)
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows Server 2008

Check out more about the Super Saver Servers here:

http://www.lpdedicated.com/servers/super-saver.php

When looking at any dedicated hosting option, hardware failure plays a very important part.  In the event of a power supply blowing, your CPU going crazy or somebody kicks the server’s power cord – you want to know your information is secure and safe.

Now with most web hosts, if you purchase any managed addons they are usually added to the internal monitoring that the web host’s server admins do.  They will now what to do with any failure the moment it happens.  In turn, depending on the situation, it might take up to/around two hours for a repair. 

Now lets say, in the case of a storage failure, are the hard drives imaged or raided in any way? 

In most cases, there is only one hard drive in the sever by default, so there are not any fault tolerance setups like images or raid.  Now if you purchase a secondary hard drive for your server, this is something that could then be setup with ease.

Need to know how to update Apache on your dedicated hosting account?  Here is a simple walkthrough to help you with the process.

Login to WHM (if Web Host Manager is installed), open Apache Update, and then select Previously Saved Config.  Now you can click Start Customizing Based on Profile.

You will need to choose needed versions of PHP and Apache as well as their components through the few next steps and at the end, you’ll be offered to save the changes you selected and proceed with Apache and PHP compilation.

There you have it, an easy way to get Apache updated on your dedicated hosting server using Web Host Manager (WHM).

How can you keep your VPS or dedicated hosting account from using too much memory?  There are a lot of tips and tricks you may look into, however here are two tried and tested methods for getting this done. 

Stop services you do not need.  For example, if you don’t use email on your server, stop email and pop3/imap services. As for your question about spamd, it is an antispam daemon used to protect email accounts on the server.

Continue optimizing the scripts installed on your site. It is rather possible that one of the scripts on oyur hosting account might not optimized for low memory usage and that could cause issues for you.  If you have trouble, disable each, one by one, till you find the one that is causing the problems.

What steps do you go through to help lower your memory consumption on a dedicated server?

Uptime, no matter if you are talking about dedicated hosting or shared hosting is the time when a server is online, functioning and available.  Now depending on the web host you go with, you might get varying results with how much uptime they promise and how much they really deliver.

Here is a handy bit of information from Web Hosting Talk:

Here’s a handy list to gauge how much downtime one may experience over the course of a year, based on a web hosting company’s uptime guarantees:

• 99.9%: 8 hours 46 minutes
• 99.5%: 43 hours 50 minutes
• 99.0%: 87 hours 39 minutes
• 98.0%: 175 hours 19 minutes

So that should give you, in a nutshell, and average you should look at when it comes to how much bang for your buck you should get.  Uptime may vary from host to host, so it might take some time to figure out which one is selling you the real deal and which one is selling you snake oil.

If your control panel does not bring Nano with it, here is how to install this text editors:

Obtain a copy of Nano at http://www.nano-editor.org/download.html and upload it to your system, pick the version ending in i386.rpm

1) Log into SSH and issue the following commands:

Code:

mkdir /home/temp (if temp doesn't already exist) or cd /home/temp

cp /pathtotherpm /home/temp/rpmname.rpm (where pathtotherpm is the path to the location where you uploaded the rpm and rpmname.rpm is the name of the rpm file such as nano-1.2.5-1.i386.rpm)

rpm -i rpmname.rpm

There you have it.  Once you are done, you will have the Nano editor installed.

Here are three great articles to help you get yourself informed about disaster recovery.

Blocking an IP Address on Your Dedicated Server

You may be thinking why do I want to block IP addresses from my dedicated server? If you have never run a dedicated server before, you might not be aware that there are people who attempt to hack entire servers to bring websites down. There are many types of server attacks, and one of the most popular can occur from a single dedicated IP address – a DdoS attack!

Data Center Checklist

As you realize the importance of a reliable dedicated hosting provider, you’ll also notice that that correlates to the reliability of the web host’s data center. This is because the data center is the backbone of the entire web hosting operation – if the data center is not secured or unsafe or loses power, your website could go down as well for the same undetermined amount of time. So choose your reliable dedicated hosting provider carefully!  Just for your safety, here’s a Data Center Checklist for you to use when comparing dedicated web hosts and their data center operations.

What is Disaster Recovery?

What does disaster recovery mean for you? You know that it sounds good – I mean, who wouldn’t want to be recovered from a disaster. Do you know what that covers though when it is one of the filled in check mark boxes at your dedicated web host of choice?

What do you do in the time of a disaster?

What time is the best time to move to a dedicated hosting account?

It is not hard to manage dedicated server without a lot of experience, if you purchase control panel for it. If you have experience with cPanel on the shared plan, I would recommend purchasing this control panel for your dedicated server as well. cPanel gets installed on most dedicated servers with similar setup like our shared ones have.

As for when to switch to the dedicated server, there can be two reasons. First is you need some component that can’t be installed on the shared server. Second is resource consumption by your site that overgrows the allowed limits for shared plan. The most important limits are CPU, memory and MySQL connection utilization.

If you don’t have access to the resource stats for your site and you can ask the support to provide them from time to time to see, if you are near to or in the the red line. However, my recommendation would be upgrading to the dedicated server before when you are expecting traffic and client amounts increase to avoid possible downtime or hurry with site switch to the new server.