Having a large amount of RAM is important to any web hosting server but especially to any Dedicated Server Hosting plan.  RAM (or Random Access Memory) is basically computer data storage that allows a user to access any “memory” on the server.  The more RAM, the faster your server is going to run and the quicker your website will load.

So how much RAM do you need?  That depends what you’re planning to host.  If you require a Dedicated server to resell space like a Reseller and the sites under you are small or don’t require much CPU or bandwidth, you’ll likely be find with the default amount, while if you’re planning to become the next Myspace or will be on the front page of Digg often, you’ll want to look into adding more – remember, you can never have too much RAM!

If you’re looking into Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Lunarpages offers 512MB RAM guaranteed, which means your site is going to experience optimized performance from a Shared Server.

If you’re planning to go Dedicated, you should take the following things into consideration in choosing the amount of RAM you add to your server:

* How popular is your website bandwidth-wise?  High bandwidth sites require more RAM.
* Are you running a large database?
* Are you running CPU-intensive scripts?

Most web hosting providers do not offer both Shared website hosting and Dedicated website hosting, but if you do not know the difference, your website may suffer from slow loading or lack of processor speeds.

A Shared Hosting Plan is a website hosting plan in which your website shares server space with 200-500 other websites.  While you do not share website files, pictures, or emails, you are essentially sharing the allotted disk space and bandwidth assigned to one specific server.  In a typical shared hosting environment, you are only allowed to use a certain percentage of the central processing unit (CPU): i.e. the computer processor that handles all requests made to the server.

If you own a small or personal website that does not receive heavy traffic, downloads, does not store a variety of pictures, video, or audio files, and/or which does not require SSH/Shell Access for installing applications or programs, you can get by with reliable shared website hosting.

A Dedicated Hosting Plan is a website hosting plan in which your website encompasses an entire web server.  What you do with this server is completely up to you, so you can host your entire website without sharing hard drive resources, CPU, or bandwidth with any other website in the world.  You can host unlimited domain names and customize the server to your specifications by choosing the amount of hard drive storage space, bandwidth, RAM, backup space, and by adding managed hosting services, choosing your own control panel, and even operating systems.

When you are out there searching for your perfect dedicated web hosting provider, you need to keep in mind if you need and if you have the ability to upgrade your server’s CPU power and usage.

During stressful server events, you might notice that even the best CPU on the planet looks to be a little stretched to it’s limits.  So to help you out in this event, make sure your dedicated hosting provider gives you the ability to upgrade your CPU usage as needed. 

Some of the best CPU specs available these days include:

• Intel Celeron 2.0ghz
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33ghz
• Intel Quad-Core Intel? Xeon? 1.6ghz

It might come at a price, but that is a small price to pay to make sure your dedicated hosting environment stays up and running. 

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.

SMART disk drives internally monitor the disks own health and performance. In many cases, the disk itself provides advance warning that something is wrong or if they are showing incorrect information.  Please see:

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

for download and installation instruction and additional documentation can be found in the man pages (man smartctl and man smartd) and on the Web page.

Next I will present some commands can be used for checking drives using smart:

smartctl -i /dev/hda

This lists model/firmware information about the disk and please use this command as root and the correct path to your hard drives .

smartctl -Hc /dev/hda

This shows the results of the health status inquiry. If your disk health status is FAILING please contact your dedicated hosting provider as soon as possible.

smartctl -A /dev/hda

This lists the disk’s table.Normally are listed a part of attributes

smartctl -l error /dev/hda

This list a log of the disk errors

smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda

This is a report of the self-tests run on the disk. There are 2 types of tests long and short.

You can control and fine-tune the behavior of smartd using the configuration file /etc/smartd.conf.

In the beginning, UNIX had only one editor, the line editor “ed.” UNIX still has ed, but few people use it. Line-by-line editors really are adequate only for making short, quick corrections to files or programs. A medieval version of UNIX contained a new program called “ex.” The most notable new feature of ex was a display editing facility which allowed a user to work with a full screen of text by giving the command vi . The new display editor proved so popular that AT&T UNIX System V included “vi” as a separate program. Vi is included in most operating systems.

This handout explains the basics of vi: creating files, moving the cursor and entering and editing text. After you have read it and practiced for a short time at your console, you should be able to do basic editing with vi. If you wish to use some of vi’s more complicated resources, we recommend a close study of the man pages.

Read on…

Before somebody sets out to purchase a dedicated hosting account, they have to be able to make the case for doing so.

Joe wants to start up a YouTube-like web site, but is not sure if dedicated hosting will do the trick.  In this situation, dedicated hosting may be his best bet, because this way he would be able to get all of the additional server features needed to compress the video on the server side without having to run into any issues with server resources.

Jill has a successful store on a shared hosting account, but is quickly out growing it.  A dedicated hosting server could offer her a wider boundary – to where she could extend her store further without having to worry about the limitations of her hosting account.

As you can see, there are many different cases that can be made for dedicated hosting these days.  You have to weigh in all your options, and the greatest of them all might be that dedicated hosting leaves a wider boundary so that you can develop your web site as you see fit.

If you have a dedicated server or are looking into purchasing one for an affordable price, you will likely need to consider how you are going to monitor that server. You have two main choices:

1. Purchase a Managed Hosting Option – these can be fairly affordable and will let your host monitor your server for you. The only downside is that you have to pay a monthly fee and you don’t have access to these monitoring tools.
2. Self-Manage Your Server – Download a server monitoring tool and self-manage the server by checking every so often for server errors, etc.

Here are some of the recommended server monitoring tools for your dedicated web server:

1. Nagios – The most popular server monitoring tool that is even used in the web hosting industry for web hosting clients on dedicated and shared servers alike. Nagios offers amazing tools that are literally unsurpassed in the industry, such as: monitoring of network services (like email, PING, etc), host resources (CPU, disk usage, logs, etc), environmental factors; simple plugin designs; contact notifications via email, pager, or user-defined methods; scheduled downtime to suppress notifications; and more! This is the most highly recommended solution available on the market to help you see what your web host sees.
2. SiteUptime – Choose from 3 different levels of server management: the free account offers more than enough for basic users, while the $5 or $10 per month option offers more features. The free level allows you to monitor in 30 and 60 minute intervals for one site and receive email notifications, monthly reports, online stats, and more.
3. Host-Alert – Check your server’s uptime and errors in increments of 5, 10, or 30 minute intervals, and have these error notifications sent via email, SMS text messaging, or both. Each notification is only sent once, so there’s no need to worry if something goes down about your inbox getting spammed. Plus you can check the status on unlimited databases, pages, and websites.

It is important to keep your eye on your resources when you have a dedicated hosting plan so that you know when and if something is about to or has gotten out of hand.  Here I hope to give you a few handy tips when it comes to monitoring your site resources and statistics in Plesk.

First thing you need to do is login to your Plesk control panel, and click on Limits.  As you can see Limits displays the resource limits allocated to your account.  It lists such details as:

• Maximum Number of Subdomains
• Disk Space
• Bandwidth
• Maximum Amount of Traffic
• Maximum Number of Web Users
• and more…

Now click on Up Level at the top of the Limits window for your domain, and click on Report.  The Report will show you all account resource limits & usage, as well as users and a full list of all available scripts, utilities and resources.

FTP Stats will show you a history of FTP activity on your site – both in upload as well as download. 

Traffic History will display information on traffic usage by Months and Years on your dedicated hosting account.  To view the detailed traffic statistics used by various services at the domain, click on the Traffic button.  The page will open displaying the traffic usage table.  You can send a copy of the report to an e-mail address you specify too at the bottom of the Report screen.  You can also set up a schedule for automatic delivery of the reports. 

The last detail about monitoring dedicated resources inside of Plesk is the Web Statistics Preferences screen.  From here you can set some of the preferences that will dictate the display of refers in your stats.

Now you should be a little more handy when it comes to stats and resources inside of your Plesk control panel via your dedicated web hosting account.

Many webmasters who utilize dedicated server hosting use it for media servers or, more exactly, for streaming video servers. It might be helpful for those of you in the market to run the next YouTube.com to be aware of what you’ll need to accomplish this.

Firstly, you may be wondering what the heck streaming servers or streaming video is! A streaming video server is just a dedicated web server setup to stream videos on demand. Your dedicated server needs to be configured to stream media effectively, by offering a compressed file version that can be easily viewed and listened to by your customers, fans, or regular surfers at the same time that it’s being delivered and processed on the server.

Methods of Streaming Media

You can use a true streaming method, which means your video is almost constantly streamed exactly while it’s being downloaded. Think of YouTube.com for this example. In true media streaming, the dedicated server and streaming video software does all the work, which produces a great end result for the user but which can also be very costly for management! Oftentimes, adding streaming media software to an already existing dedicated server is the most affordable option.

The other option is downloading, which we’re all pretty familiar with. This is far cheaper because the entire video file is downloaded and saved as a temporary file on the computer. However, this method is not suitable for a YouTube.com type dedicated server.

There is a plethora of free streaming media software available on the internet for your perusal and use.

Why Stream Media Live?

If you are running any of the following server types on your dedicated server, your visitors will appreciate live streaming of video or audio for their convenience:

* A YouTube.com clone
* An adult website (make sure you choose an adult web host)
* A video-sharing website
* A podcasting server
* Silverlight media server

What kind of dedicated server do I need?

Go with something BIG because you will need it! I would recommend the following features:

* Dual or Quad Core Xeon Processor
* at least 2 x 1024 MB RAM
* at least 2 x 500 GB SATA Hard Drives
* Raid 4 or 5
* at least 3,000GB bandwidth

Please take a look at our dedicated hosting coupons for the best dedicated server deals you can find, which are sure to knock down the primarily steep price for you!