An SSL Certificate is one of the most integral aspects of any Dedicated Server, especially if you are running ecommerce. SSL simply stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is nothing more than a trust certificate that secures and encrypts all sensitive data and payment information processed on your website. Without an SSL Certification, your website will not only be accepting information that could possibly be stolen or transmitted unsafely across the internet but your customers will likely not trust your website enough to even purchase anything.

Also, you’ll want to note that you will not be able to process credit card payments through a payment gateway without an SSL certificate.

Any good dedicated hosting provider will offer several SSL options to suit all your expenses for your ecommerce website.

Ecommerce website hosting is a large part of any business’s online services. If you have a product to sell, you need an ecommerce hosting plan that can be tailored to your website’s specific needs.

Ecommerce hosting is just a term to describe an online business website, where the primary function of that website is to sell goods or services. While many small ecommerce sites can be hosted on a shared server, most if not all of the big ones (such as Amazon.com, Shopzilla, Overstock.com, etc) are hosted on a dedicated web server or many dedicated servers clustered together.

There are several things you need to establish to run a successful ecommerce website, including:

* a reliable web host
* a Dedicated IP address
* an SSL certificate
* a Payment Gateway

Once you have all these things, you can begin to create your ecommerce website and watch the money start rolling in.

Having an ecommerce website is a big responsibility for any webmaster, and oftentimes you need to do a lot of research in order to get started. Here’s a quick list and brief description of the things you’ll need to have in order to start your ecommerce website.

* Dedicated IP Address

This is necessary in order to get an SSL Certificate, as only one site (yours) will be using this IP. In a shared server environment, many websites might share the same IP address, while if you are running on a dedicated server, you’ll likely need your own dedicated IP anyway. Purchasing one ahead of time will save you time and money in the long run.

* SSL Certificate

This certificate secures your website and all purchases made within its pages, so that each transaction is safe, secure, and fully encrypted. Without an SSL certificate, your customers’ critical payment information could be shared across the internet, as their information will not be encrypted without one. Having an SSL certificate also normally gives you a “trust logo”, which assures your visitors and all potential and future customers that you are a safe and reliable seller.

* Reliable Web Hosting

Whether you are searching for shared, dedicated, windows, or VPS hosting plans, our recommended web hosting provider, Lunarpages Web Hosting, has all the solutions under one roof. Having a reliable web host to rely on will assure your business saves money and your web presence is only 24/7.

* Payment Gateway

Finally, in order to actually process monetary transactions on your website, you need a payment gateway. Payment gateways take the internet transaction and process it into actual funds that are deposited wherever you want them.

Buying a dedicated server is a big purchase and this is the backbone of your online presence, so it is vital to phone or email the web hosts you are considering with some questions, prior to forking out hundreds of dollars.

Here are our top 10 suggested questions:

1. How long before my Dedicated Server is available to use?
2. Why should I choose your company to host my website?
3. Do you have 24/7 phone support?
4. Where will my server be located?
5. Do you provide backups for free?
6. How secure is my server?
7. What is the contract duration I am committing to?
8. Is there a money back guarantee and how long is it?
9. Can I upgrade or downgrade and will I incur penalties for this?
10. Linus or Windows?

We recommend Lunarpages Dedicated Web Hosting! Call or email them and see how they score with our top 10 questions

Why choose dedicated over VPS?

• VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) allows hardware to run at a higher utilization rate.
• Management issues as VPS requires more Ethernet cables, networking and switches.
• Hardware can run at a higher utilization rate with VPS.
• Disk I/O performance may back up due to additional disk frags.
• Vulnerabilities are more common and involved with VPS.
• It is time consuming and not efficient to manage many IP addresses.
• There are sometimes software licensing advantages when running VPS.
• It can be challenging to make backups of one or two versions of less mainstream software and programs.
• They are cheaper since usually they have less power costs than one physical server.
• VPS need costly drivers like multi-port network adapters.
• VPS are more affordable requiring less power than one dedicated server.
• It is difficult to manage large number of IP addresses, MAC addresses etc
• VPS overhead is less than 5% on some modern visualization software like Virtuozzo.
• Maintaining a VPS is still more costly and patching all virtual servers with various operating systems on many physical servers requires their own maintenance.

It looks like the answer is Dedicated Web Hosting!  Check out LPDedicated.com, Lunarpages Web Hosting’s brand of dedicated affordable solutions

Where should i place the "ErrorDocument 404 /missing.html" code in my httpd.conf file?

Should i place it between the:

<Directory /home/*/public_html></Directory> tags and remove the #?

Where should i place it?

According the Apache manual, the ErrorDocument directive is legal in these contexts: server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess.

This means that you may place ErrorDocument directive between those Directory tags and uncomment them. This way you’ll setup ErrorDocument for each directory mapped by wildcard /home/*/public_html.

Hope this helps those of you out there with this type of issue!

Sometimes a dedicated web hosting deal can be too good to be true.  Never let yourself fall for the advertising of a dedicated server before you take the time and consideration it takes to really check out all the services a dedicated web hosting provider is willing to provide to you.

Read on…

How do domain name servers work?  I recently ran across a great article that covers this topic from head to toe.

If you spend any time on the Internet sending e-mail or browsing the Web, then you use domain name servers without even realizing it. Domain name servers, or DNS, are an incredibly important but completely hidden part of the Internet, and they are fascinating. The DNS system forms one of the largest and most active distributed databases on the planet. Without DNS, the Internet would shut down very quickly.

Read more about how domain name servers work here:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/dns.htm

In dedicated web hosting circles, you might hear the name “Plesk” tossed around.  What is a Plesk, how do you use a Plesk, and why do you need a Plesk?!  The Parallels Plesk Panel is a software package used by commercial web hosting companies to help you control your hosting account, VPS account or dedicated server.

Read on…

Dedicated hosting is a tricky beast. 

Knowing everything a dedicated hosting server should provide is enough to make your head spin too.  So with that in mind, and to help you start the new year off right – I thought I would share with you some of the more important features to look for.

Read on…