When shopping for a dedicated hosting solution, there are a lot of things you should make note of and watch out for. here are a few dedicate server shopping tips next time you decide to toss one in your shopping cart.

Review the Legal Documents – Make sure you check out the terms of service or acceptable use policy for the dedicated hosting in question. This way you can be sure of what you can or can not do as well as what might happen if you run into any related problems.

How is Support – Also make sure that you check out the support options they give to you and make sure it is “enough” as far as what you need. You might also want to check into to see how managed the hosting plan you have you eye on is to see what level of “hand holding” you might get with server issues.

Additional Fees – Most web hosts will lay things out on their web site if there are any additional fees for additional services. Others like to hide this fact though. Be sure that all the additional fees that might be needed are laid out in front of you before signing on the dotted line so you know what costs might or might not be involved later down the road.

Dedicated Server Limits – Be sure to ask about server limitations too. With dedicated hosting you should have access to more than enough CPU, RAM and more. Also check in to see if the bandwidth and disk space can be upgraded for the plan and if so – then how much it will cost.

As you can see picking the right dedicated host can be a tricky situation. Review Lunarpages Dedicated hosting solutions to see how many of these tips are done right. You have to know what to watch out for mostly, and have in mind the type of hosting setup you will need. With that basic idea before you start, there is less likely of a chance you will get sold anything you do not need.

Are you planning to run a legal adult website?  Are you finding that it’s extremely difficult to find a web host who allows adult content?  Even when you do find a host, is your adult server too expensive?

These are all common problems for businesses running adult websites and looking for an adult web host.  The most difficult part of running your adult site is often finding a reliable, affordable dedicated web host to host your business.  The next step is understanding what is allowed and what is not.

What You Need:

* Plenty of hard drive space and bandwidth!  If you are running a successful adult website on a dedicated server, you are going to see a great deal of traffic and you cannot exist on a shared server.

* Uptime – 99.9% uptime is standard.

* Managed Hosting – make sure your site is taken care of 24/7/365

* IP Address – you’ll need this for SEO (search engine optimization) and to process online payments

What You Should Ask:

Make sure you ask your future provider the following questions:

• Do you allow legal adult content?
• What are your rules on adult content?
• Do you charge extra to host adult content?

You will definitely want to be on a Dedicated Server Hosting plan if you are running an adult website.  Try our recommend dedicated host for quality adult webhosting at an affordable price.

When you purchase a dedicated server from your new web host, you’ll need to decide whether you want to manage your own server or if you’d like the web hosting provider to manage it for you. You’ll more than likely have to pay for even the most basic Managed Hosting options, so if you’re not prepared to spend the extra money every month, you can manage the server internally yourself. However, be careful with a self-managed solution – if you are not technically savvy, you are going to want to pay a little extra to have the dedicated hosting provider help you out.

So what is self-managed? A self-managed dedicated server hosting plan allows you to take over the maintenance and installation tasks associated with running your own dedicated web hosting server. These kinds of solutions are best left to experienced professionals who either have extensive System Administration knowledge or have managed their own dedicated server in the past, considering setting up and maintaining your dedicated server is not an easy task.

With self-managed hosting, you have complete SSH/root access to your dedicated server to install anything you’d like. The basic things you’ll need will be a control panel to manage the server, applications to run your website, and anything else you need to make your website appear on the internet.

Knowing what is available for tools to self manage your dedicated server will help you out a lot, so do your research well.

If you are planning to become your own web hosting company, are looking to resell web hosting space for profit, and/or would like to provide hosting to your clients at some point in the future, you are going to need to know the differences between the types of hosting you can purchase.

Reseller Hosting is a low-cost but low-resource hosting plan, wherein you become your own web hosting company. Your clients are each given control panels of their own and you are allowed to brand these to suit your company’s image, so that your customers will never know they are hosting with the provider you’re using as a Reseller. The downside for this usually affordable hosting plan is that your customers go to you, as the web host, for billing and technical issues. They cannot simply email the big web host to get assistance, as they wouldn’t even know the bigger host exists. Another downside is the limits on storage and bandwidth – you cannot itemize how many resources you a lot to each customer. All customers get the same storage, bandwidth, emails, etc.

Dedicated Server Hosting is often much more expensive, but if you have a long list of clients to host, you can often make a greater profit from Dedicated Hosting than from Reseller Hosting, because you are only paying for one plan as opposed to paying for 50 small reseller accounts. With Dedicated Server Hosting, you can also a lot storage and bandwidth amounts to each specific customer, based on your quote of storage and bandwidth. So if you have 80GB hard drive space, you can give one customer 1GB and another 5GB, making each customer happy. You can also brand the control panel to your company’s image, as well as create your own nameservers, which will make your company look even more official.

Overall, Dedicated Server Hosting is best for companies who need a great deal of storage and bandwidth or have many customers in need of reliable hosting.

When shopping for a dedicated hosting provider, how important is it to find the cheapest deal?

Sure, everybody likes saving money, and it is an important thing to find the lowest cost, especially these days.  However, you have to remember not to sell out when it comes to dedicated hosting features you might need.  Be sure to have a good estimate or checklist of:

• All the Services You Need
• All the Services You Want (but don’t really have to have)

This will give you a little more negotiating room when it comes to settle for a bottom dollar price.

When push comes to shove, you have to do your best to find the dedicated hosting plan that is the cheapest deal and best suits your web hosting needs.  If you find a dedicated host that doesn’t get meet your price you are willing to pay, be sure to contact them to see if there are any coupons or deal that could be applied to lower the price just a little ‘bit more.

When looking for the perfect place to call home in the dedicated hosting world, you might turn towards a dedicated hosting provider that is green.  What is green hosting all about?  Let me see if I can wrap your mind around the idea here.

The idea behind green hosting or eco-friendly hosting is a simple one.  They promise that their company in a whole (counting the servers they are hosting on) do not negatively impact the environment.

Now this can be done in a number of different ways.  Some will purchase carbon credits, to offset the carbon dioxide they are putting out into the atmosphere. Others might do it through virtualization, a type of web hosting that will share resources among customers, so you can more effectively use the servers hardware.  One more way would be to use more energy friendly servers.  Using severs that need less power is a great way to lower the cost of hosting, and help the environment at the same time.

Now I wouldn’t say that green hosting is the only aspect you should look into when it comes to dedicated hosting – but it is worth seeing how they do it, if they do it.  Never be afraid to ask that of your dedicated hosting provider.

Many people might want to know, when is it the right time to take that next step into high performance dedicated hosting. 

This type of web hosting setup is perfect for the enterprise level customer who needs a higher performing server. Heavy MySQL/MSSQL users, multi-user systems, and gaming sites are preferred for these servers, which utilize more CPU and disk space for better performance overall.

Don’t accept anything less than:

• Dual Dual Core Intel? 5130 Xeon? 2.0Ghz
• 4 GB Included (at least) for Backup Storage
• 4 x 1024 MB of RAM
• 4 x 146GB SCSI Hard Drives – Hardware Raid 5, 10

I hope that helps you decide if you need high performance dedicated hosting and what you might want to start looking for (or at least adding to your shopping list). 

SSL (secure socket layer) Certificates are designed to keep your website files protected, but a lot of ecommerce webmasters require something even more secure in order to accept monetary transactions via their websites.

So when is it time to get a pro SSL certificate and when is it okay to have just a basic shared SSL?

Shared SSLs

• These are good for personal or business websites that do not require an active ecommerce website. So if you are not planning to take credit card payments directly on your website through a merchant gateway, you can use a shared SSL just fine.
• Shared SSLs are just that – shared! So know that you are sharing a secure space with multiple users. The IP address for this certificate will be shared among most likely very different websites. Some customers fear being associated with an adult website or moneymaking scheme in this way, so they opt to upgrade. Most customers will never have to worry about this.
• If you are using PayPal to receive payments or referring your customers to a website outside of your own for payment, you do not need a pro SSL.
• If you purchase a dedicated server hosting plan, you only have the option of purchasing a pro SSL since your server isn’t ‘shared’ with anyone else.

Pro SSLs

• Pro SSL certificates are best for websites that require ecommerce payments to be made directly through their websites.
• If you are working with a payment gateway to take payments through your website, more than likely you will be required to purchase a pro SSL.
• Pro SSL certificates secure all transactions made on your website and ensure your customers feel safe about their purchases.
• On a dedicated web hosting account, you must purchase a pro SSL, as shared SSLs are not an option.

Need a good monitoring tool for your server?  There are several services online out there today that will give you the best in performance monitoring, availability monitoring, and traffic monitoring. 

• SiteUptime
• Host Tracker
• mon.itor.us
• FreeSiteStatus
• Site24?7

My personal favorite out of these selections would have to be mon.itor.us.  It has the most tools, and it is totally free to use. 

We have all done it.  We went out to see what reviews we could find on or about the dedicated web hosting we have now or the dedicated web hosting we are interested in picking up?  Then you see it.  A big, bad and nasty negative review.  As your palms get sweaty, you think to yourself, “Should I read it?”.  Well, I am here to tell you that you should, but take it with a grain of salt.  A healthy dose of skepticism never did any harm.

After reading a bad review, the first thing I want you to remember is that every coin has two sides.  Your only hearing from the ticked off customer in many of these cases, and you don’t know what they did to to the web host in question.  Something else I have learned over the years of working in the hosting world is that happy people usually don’t post reviews.  If you are happy, and you know it you usually don’t do squat.  Is it beyond belief?  Well, when was the last time you wrote Oscar Mayer to tell them you love their baloney?  I promise you though that the guy who found a human finger in his baloney wrote them a nasty letter.

Not to say there is anything wrong or bad with leaving good reviews.  Heck some of those are the ones that really make people excited, due to their lack of actually happening.  It is kind of like finding a duck dressed up like Abraham Lincoln.  You don’t know how he got there, he probably won’t come back again, but he did put a smile on your face.  So remember, not all bad reviews are as bad as they seem.  Sure, they may be rooted in some truth, however you should get a wide variety of opinions to see if this was just one guy out of the blue having problem, or if you can spot a trend.