Web Hosting Blog :: Ubiquity Hosting Solutions

As your site grows, your hardware might need to as well.  In fact, with any sizable growth, upgrading the hardware that is dishing out content to your users is inevitable.  Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at some general strategy in upgrading hardware so you get the best bang for your buck.  After all, not in your interest or our interest to waste time, money, and resources on upgrades that don’t make sense.  If this is your first Linux Dedicated Server, you might want to check out last week’s post about renting your first dedicated server.

Choosing the Processor

You have four basic options for your processor. Our entry level Celeron, the Xeon 3220, the Xeon 5220, and the Dual Xeon 5520.

Celeron D 325 -  The Celeron is a server with a heartbeat – it’s an entry level system designed more around meeting the definition of “dedicated server” at the lowest price possible than performance.  And it’s great at doing that!  It’s a great system for a basic site that needs the power of a dedicated server, but the budget of a hobby.

Single Xeon 3220 – Is an entry level quad core processor made by Intel.  It’s has more than 8 times the computing power of the Celeron D 325.  The nice thing is that it can take you leagues above an entry level server like the Celeron D 325 without the price of a 5520.  The downside, however, is that next time you need to upgrade, you’ll be migrating to another server again (see below).

Single Xeon 5520 – This server is built using one of the best processors available today.  It’s significantly more powerful than the single Xeon 3220, but the best part (and don’t underestimate how awesome this is!) when you need to upgrade, you don’t need a new server.  We’ll just pop in a second processor and suddenly you have a dual Xeon machine.

Dual Xeon 5520 – As you may have guessed, the dual Xeon 5520 is about twice as powerful as the single Xeon 5520.  In fact, it’s the same hardware, just an extra processor.

Once you find that the Dual Xeon 5520 isn’t powerful enough, it’s time to contact our sales department about upgrading to custom hardware or to a web server cluster.  We’re making custom solutions every day, so we’re well versed in scaling your operation as large as you need us to!

As your site grows, so do your IT needs.  Most sites just start as a little seedling of an idea on a shared hosting plan visited by a few friends.  Over time and with the proper care, your site will grow exponentially, quickly working it’s way to the largest shared hosting plan, then making the jump to a VPS, and working it’s way up through the VPS plans.  Eventually you’ll need a dedicated server, which can be the most daunting jump to take.  Here’s a brief overview, using Ubiquity Hosting Linux Dedicated Servers as an example.

You have four basic choices, a Celeron (Celeron D 325), a basic quad core server (single Xeon 3220), a high end quad core server (single Xeon 5520), and a beefy dual quad core server (dual Xeon 5520.)  Making the jump from a VPS to a dedicated server may already exhaust the budget, and if it has, just snag a Celeron.  But if there’s a little room in the budget, the best thing you can do is get to the Xeon 3220.  It’s as powerful as eight of the entry level Celerons (plus double the memory!) and it’s only $40/month more.  You’ll feel this upgrade more than any other.

The next thing to think about is RAM.  RAM (Random Access Memory, often just called “memory”) is essentially the computer’s workspace.  I like to tell customers to think of it as how much counter space you have while cooking.  If you’re making a big, elaborate meal for a lot of guests, you’re going to need a lot of counter space to prepare that meal, right?  If you’re making a big, elaborate website for a lot of guests, you’re going to need a lot of memory to serve those pages.  One of the easiest ways to increase site performance is simply by increasing the memory.  Expect to spend about $20 per gb per month on memory.  If $70 isn’t in the budget for the processor upgrade, this is the next best place to spend some money for a performance gain.

In the past, if you’ve been on shared hosting or VPS’, you’ve likely been protected from hardware failure by a RAID solution.  RAID (Redundant array of Independent Disks) is used to increase speed or performance in hard drive configurations.  RAID0 increases performance while RAID1 provides redundancy.  If you’re not making backups, you need RAID1 or you risk losing your data in a hard drive crash.  You likely won’t need RAID0 until you’ve upgraded your dedicated server, as it tends to be something that doesn’t cause a bottleneck right away.  If you’re making backups of your site and saving them to a backup service (we offer one) or to your local computer, you don’t necessarily need RAID unless you want the convenience.  If you’re not making backups, you NEED RAID1.

Bandwidth – 6000gb is probably more than enough bandwidth.  If you need more than that, you probably already know it and the upgrade to 12000gb is $70/month.  If you need more than that, contact our sales team if you aren’t sure what you’re doing.  We can be reached at sales (at) ubiquityhosting (dot) com.

If you have any questions about any aspect of ordering servers, don’t hesitate to let us know.  It can be a daunting task the first time you do it, possibly even the first few times.  We’re here to help, so don’t be shy!  We can be reached at sales (at) ubiquityhosting (dot) com.

On Monday, May 3rd 2010 Ubiquity officially launched the beta of our new control panel, https://cp.ubiquityservers.com/  This control panel is stocked with features that we’ve previously offered as well as a whole host of new features.  This panel is used for billing, ordering new services, server management, and server monitoring.

Some of the features include:

• Bulk rDNS updates (or any rDNS updates for that matter)
• SWIP requests
• IP justification requests
• Control panel license ordering
• Web based remote reboot
• Some control panel interaction (for example, seeing how much space is used on an Interworx box)
• Brandable reselling
• Ordering additional services
• VPS load average graphing, memory graphing

And more! So be sure to check out https://cp.ubiquityservers.com/ with the same username and password that you would use for https://my.ubiquityservers.com.

If you have any questions or see any bugs, let us know!  You can reach us for bug reports at support (dot) ubiquityservers (dot) com!

With the advent of forex and stock trading software and a dramatic increase in the popularity of the software, something that has become very popular is the usage of a dedicated server to trade stocks.  Generally speaking, the people doing this type of trading are smart businesspersons, but generally not the company IT guy.  This causes the classic example of the technology gap between the decision maker and the technical details of what that decision maker needs.  If you’re in this situation, hopefully these tips can help you sort out what you need and how to get it.

1. Figure out what the software system requirements are.  This is more simple than it sounds.  Most, if not all, of the companies who make this software make it for desktop computers and post on their site what the minimum computer specs are to install it on your PC.  Servers use the same technical numbers and it’s typically an apples to apples comparison.  If the software vendor doesn’t list the specs on their site, contact them and they’d be more than happy to let you know what the minimum technical specifications are.  A server with Windows 2003 will meet a requirement for “Windows XP” and a server with Windows 2008 will meet a requirement for “Windows Vista” or “Windows 7.”
2. Decide where you want to trade.  If you’re mostly trading on markets based in New York City, it’s very wise to put your server there.  Putting your server in Manhattan gives you a few milliseconds edge over a guy trading out of his basement in Boston.  Putting your server in Chicago when trading on Chicago markets gives you an edge over some guy in Atlanta trying to trade on the same market.  Fortunately, Ubiquity offers servers in both Chicago and New York City.
3. Ask for help if you need it.  Don’t be shy.  Our sales department handles requests every day and there’s a good chance we’ve seen your problem or a problem similar to it.  We’ve got nothing but time to help you and we really want to, too.  So ask away, our email address is sales (at) ubiquityservers (dot) com.

Within no time you’ll be trading.  Not sure where to start?  The most popular choice here is a Xeon 3460, 4gb memory, 500gb HDD, Windows 2003 Standard in NYC.  Good luck and don’t be afraid to ask for help!

Well, it depends on who you’re talking to.  Everyone defines server management differently and at the current time, there are no industry standards on what “server management” means.  To some providers, it simply means replacing hardware that goes bad.  To other providers, it means programming your scripts for you, setting up email accounts, and actively monitoring your firewall logs to check for an intrusion.  What’s generally true everywhere though is that the scope of the management is largely what you pay for it.

So what does management mean with Ubiquity?  We’re right in the middle of the pack with both our pricing and what we provide.  When we manage a server, we are responsible for:

* Hosting Software updates (Apache, MySQL, etc.)
* Operating system updates
* Software Firewall services
* Backup services (if purchased, not included by default)
* Advanced technical support
* Server monitoring and recovery
* Anti-spam and virus protection
* Security scans and audits
* Some Advanced configurations
* Control panel software updates

That isn’t a complete list – it would be a daunting task to itemize everything that is included and not included.  The general concept, though, is that for $20/month ($50 including the required control panel,) we’ll keep an eye on a long list of things related to the hosting environment itself and proactively fix them if something goes wrong.

Who needs management?  Well, it’s not necessarily just a server novice that needs it.  Oftentimes the demands of proactively monitoring a server are too time consuming for even the most advanced server users – and $20/month is a small price to pay for the peace of mind that your server may go down at 3 am, but someone is already working on it for you.

Which brings us to why management – why would anyone need someone else to keep an eye on their server?  Won’t your site visitors, customers, friends, or employees tell you if your server goes down?  Sure, they might do that.  But then you’ll still need to know how to fix the problem.  The complexities of maintaining a web hosting environment are seemingly limitless.  It takes Ubiquity about two months to train someone in-depth on fixing most problems and it’s about two years before a tech is really seasoned enough to know 95% of the problems.  Having a single server, even for years, will never expose you to what can go wrong with your server.  And when something goes wrong, that’s when you need a fix as soon as possible by someone who knows how to fix it.

While things said and done online have always been pretty permanent, for example, you can still read thousands (if not millions) of Usenet posts from the ’80s, it seems like every day people come up with new ways to keep archiving the Interwebs.  Thanks to digital storage becoming ever cheaper the things you post online will likely be there for the foreseeable future.  One such reminder is Twitter (www.twitter.com) handing over every public tweet to the Library of Congress.

On one hand, it’s not terribly groundbreaking – the LOC could have simply used the Twitter API to look up every tweet and copy it.  On the other hand it’s a landmark step in the direction of the LOC keeping historical copies of important events that happen online.  For the rest of time, Barack Obama’s first presidential tweet will be a part of the Library of Congress.  It’s really a neat recognition of how social networking sites can document significant events just as much as things that happen offline can.

What’s interesting about this, is that Twitter doesn’t actually delete tweets – even if you’re like me, someone who “tweets and deletes” (I delete my time-sensitive tweets) they’re never really deleted; just flagged by Twitter not to show publicly.  There’s no information right now on whether or not those tweets will be included in the LOC, but presumably they won’t because they’re not publicly visible.

So keep on Tweetin’ your way into the Library of Congress.

There are a few design things you need in your site that are more than just optional – they’re essential parts of web design culture.  Some sites, however, seem to leave these out.

1) Your logo, if displayed on every page, should link back to your main page. If you have a logo on the header on every page of your site, it’s customary to have that logo link back to your main page.  It’s an often used shortcut back to the main page when a user becomes lost in your content (see item #2.)

2) You should never be more than 4-5 clicks away from any other page on your site. It’s incredibly easy to bury content deep within your site.  In the near-infinite Internet, users don’t have time for complex navigation schemes.  When you design your site, keep in mind that most of your content should be easy to navigate to from anywhere else on the site.  Write it out on paper in a diagram if you have trouble visualizing it.

3) Your page should have an about or contact section. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to contact the owner of the site if there is no contact information available.  I’m not suggesting that you need to give out your name, address, and cell phone number, but it’s nice to have a generic email or contact form on your site.  This helps people who are trying to contact you about anything on your site – questions, comments, corrections, etc.  The other thing you ought to have is an “about” page.  While that’s not mandatory on *all* sites, it is incredibly necessary on most sites.  If your site is a blog about global warming, having an about page mentioning your credentials is an important (and often overlooked) section of a site.

4) If you post anything that could be considered time sensitive, it should have a date. It’s pretty frustrating to run across an article without a date when the date is an important part.  I probably don’t have to elaborate much on this bullet point, but remember that if you post something that says “The population of the world is 6 billion people” it should probably be dated incase someone stumbles on it in 5 years.

5) Link to your social networking pages. Welcome to web 2.0, if you don’t link to your social networking pages, you’re soooooooooooo 2004.