One of the problems that SMBs have to deal with in the Web 2.0 business environment is finding reliable partners and providers. In a world of acquisitions and mergers, startups and spin offs, when ‘cutting edge’ is the order of the day, it’s hard to find companies with an established track record. Hard, but not impossible.
(more…)
Topics
Dedicated Hosting
Search
- Customer Insight
- Hosting Industry News
- Managed Application Hosting
- Managed Dedicated Hosting
- Managed Hosted Infrastructure
- Partner Program
- Uncategorized
- Why NaviSite Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting
Search
Follow us on
Contact Us
Chat is open 6:00 am to 7:30 pm Eastern Time (US & Canada).
Why NaviSite – Dedicated Hosting – History & Leadership
Monday, April 20th, 2009 by Sumeet Sabharwal
Parallels Plesk Panel 9.0 – Simplifies Server Management while Greatly Expanding Server Capabilities
Thursday, February 12th, 2009 by William TollNaviSite is pleased to announce the availability of an updated version of Parallels Plesk Panel for our Managed Dedicated Server and Virtual Dedicated Server customers.Parallels (formerly SWsoft) has been the leading provider of control panels for both Liunx and Windows servers for several years.
(more…)
Online Storage Options – Affordable & Flexible
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 by William TollOver the years we have seen disk storage allotments increase dramatically with Web hosting plans. About 9 years ago a large shared hosting provider had a “leading storage allotment” of 150MB on their $19.95 plan. Back then 7,000MB of storage hardware would cost $60,000! With the digital revolution (audio, video, and images), the increasing size of databases and compliance needs driving record/log storage, many companies are in a situation where demand is beginning to outpace supply.
(more…)
2008: Looking Back at Small Business Hosting Purchases
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 by William TollSmall and medium-sized businesses found 2008 to be the year when many previously “leading edge” and “out of reach” technologies became accessible and, more importantly, critical to their bottom line. In 2008, SMB technology teams, ISVs, and IT consultants were transforming their technology deployments to hosting services utilizing formerly out-of-reach technologies.
For the first time, SMBs were benefiting from solutions and technologies such as Software as a Service, Quad-Core CPUs, Virtualization, and the new Microsoft server technologies.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is now the preferred method for SMBs to consume software to meet their application and business process needs. SMBs now clearly see that it no longer makes sense to buy software and hardware from traditional retailers and distributors. The VARs and MSPs that service SMBs have moved from break-fix agreements to recurring arrangements with their SMB customers. In 2008, SaaS became not only a viable option but in many ways the preferred solution. Large capital outlays on new hardware and the associated big expenses on installation and upgrade licenses are now seen as the not financially advisable and inefficient. Hosted dedicated servers and virtual dedicated servers enable SMBs and their VARs to quickly deploy new solutions and upgrades and save time and capital.
(more…)
Tis’ the season for NaviSite Dedicated Hosting’s Shared Load Balancer
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 by William TollNaviSite small business Dedicated Hosting customers know that this time of the year Internet traffic begins to pick up measurably. Ecommerce begins to soar as consumers begin researching and buying goods and services online. Financial and insurance firms experience an end of the year rush to prepare for the new year of taxes. Small businesses run end of year reports.
Given the explicit cost of attracting clicks and visitors, businesses need to make every visitor count! Every request to a dedicated server is important! Delays, time-outs and server slow-downs are not acceptable, this time of the year or any time of the year for that matter!
A Shared or Dedicated Load Balancer accepts the traffic and distributes it evenly between servers, ensuring access to your servers is available, even on peak days like big ecommerce day: “Black Friday”.
NaviSite has been providing enterprise class load balancing solutions for over a decade. Depending on their need and scale, our SMB dedicated server customers can opt for either our Shared or Dedicated Load Balancer solution. Our Shared Load Balancer solution is hardware based and configured in pairs with a high degree of redundancy, making it extremely suitable for high performance web sites or applications. A hardware load balancer is far superior to a software solution offered by the competition as the processing of requests is done on the highly tuned load balancer, not your servers. As most customers are looking to achieve server availability and performance in a simple, elegant way, we have architected the perfect shared solution. It’s almost – set and forget!
Our Shared Load Balancers are built using Citrix® NetScalers®, a purpose-built dedicated hardware application platform that provides an optimized traffic management solution, enabling increased Web application availability. We have enabled the Load Balancer to send traffic in a round robin configuration to the multiple servers our customers select. Additionally, the service features session persistence mechanisms to ensure a consistent experience. With the capability to support the bandwidth and connections that our customers need, and a reasonable price per server connected, we believe this is the best solution at the best price in the market.
The solution we deliver is completely managed in all aspects. We manage the network and the device. We create the profiles for your solution. You run your applications and manage your business. Your Website visitors and application users will appreciate your thoughtful planning and desire to provide the optimum experience.
NaviSite Dedicated Servers can be connected to our Dedicated or Shared Load Balancers for as little as $100 per server, per month. Call or click here to order a dedicated hosting package today.
RAID Explained & Why You Should Care
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 by William TollHard Disks have moving parts. Hard Disks fail. Hard Disk failures can result into data loss. Small businesses that loose data are at a greater risk of business failure and financial hardship. The hard disk industry knows this and a recent Carnegie Mellon University study looked at 100,000 hard drives and reached to the conclusion that hard drive manufacturers were exaggerating their meantime before failure (MTBF) rates by 15%. NaviSite strongly encourages businesses to seek solutions and providers that encourage the greater use of technologies like RAID.
Let’s discuss RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) which, when implemented, can significantly increase a server’s reliability and performance while decreasing risk by an order of magnitude.
There are several methods of implementing RAID on a server – some software based and some hardware based. It is widely accepted that hardware RAID is preferred as it is more reliable and requires less CPU cycles to be implemented. RAID uses a significant amount of computation processing while reading and writing information. All NaviSite Dedicated Hosting servers include standard hardware RAID.
RAID Levels are an important concept. The more hard drives that are in a server – will enable additional RAID options. The widely used RAID levels include RAID 0, 1, 5, 10. There are also variants of these core RAID levels. Let’s look closely at RAID 1, 5, 10 – the three most popular and widely deployed:
RAID 1 – often referred to as “Mirrored Disks” can be considered by many to be a backup solution. RAID 1 requires two hard drives which store the same data.
RAID 5 – often considered the first step to redundancy includes three or more disks that are “striped with parity” and protects data against the loss of any single disk.
RAID 10 – aka (1+0) requires four or more drives and has the benefits of both striping and mirroring.
In brief, the more disks a server has, the more likely there is “mirroring and striping” with these disks. Mirroring is the process of copying data to more than one disk. Striping is “splitting data across more than one disk.” Striping can increase performance as data that is requested by the server and application will be processed more quickly as it is coming from two drives instead of one.
Important concepts to consider – data that is written to a RAID disk set is written and protected on multiple drives – however that data may be corrupt or incorrect. RAID does not replace a proper backup solution.
RAID should be a ‘must have’ on your list for a dedicated server – it provides better Data Security, Fault Tolerance, Improved Availability and with striping – Improved Performance. NaviSite Dedicated Hosting includes RAID 1 as standard on all servers with RAID 5 being standard on servers with more than 2 hard drives. RAID 10 is available on servers that support four or more hard drives.
