Hosting TutorialPlease use this tutorial to resolve any myths or questions you may have regarding hosting before continuing your search for a hosting provider.Chapter One - Overview Chapter Two - Relative Pricing Chapter Three - Space Requirements Chapter Four - Bandwidth Requirements Chapter Five - Email Information Chapter Six - Counters and Statistics Chapter Seven - Real CGI-Bin Chapter Eight -Control Panel Chapter Nine - Mailing Lists/News Letter Chapter Ten - E-Commerce Chapter Eleven - FTP Chapter Twelve - Connection and Reliability Chapter Thirteen - Support Hosting OverviewShopping AroundResellers and Affiliates Real vs Virtual Rosserver.com Hosting Shopping around To avoid the pitfalls set by rip-off artists, greedy management, and incompetent tech support, you must know what to look for. The purpose of this tutorial is to teach you what hosting can and is supposed to do for you. As well as educate you on the features, and services so that you can compare terms and numbers more knowledgeably. We hope to expose some of the tricks used by less honest internet hosts to hook you into purchasing their low quality services. Shopping around for a host can be compared to shopping for a doctor, because you never know what you're going to get, BUT, with doctors comes the AMA regulating doctors activities, and insurance companies somewhat regulating prices, we get none of those benefits with hosting. Shopping for a host can be compared to buying a car, because they all look alike until something needs fixing, then the REAL service shows in the support department. Back to the top Resellers and Affiliates Resellers and affiliates are called a wave of the future powered by the Internet, this is a remarkable idea, letting others promote your product at no expense to you, paying commissions to the affiliate, and letting the reseller charge whatever he can. The question to you is, are you looking at an actual host or just an affiliate, or are you dealing with a reseller. Since Intel, IBM, Sun, Unix, and Frontier don't offer hosting, then we are ALL resellers. We resell the processing power of our CPUs, the space on our hard drives, we resell the bandwidth on our telecom lines. But there is a breed of hosts, that resell the entire service of another host, these are known as resellers. Most reseller plans DO NOT include support. Support is the number one reason why webmasters leave one host to look for another. Some resellers are quite knowledgeable, 99.9% are not. Most got into reselling as a get-rich-quick scheme sold to them by an unscrupulous web host. There is no easy way to spot a reseller, some will also resell, they may or may not have their own nameservers, but the source will undoubtedly have more invested in his business, machines and personnel, and depending on management there will be an emphasis on support that may not be present with the reseller. Affiliates are harmless they just turn you over to the real host for their commission, if you choose to go with the host please don't cut the affiliate out it won't save you anything, and he earned his commission by showing you to the host. Our resellers are excellent! Made up mostly of experienced webmasters, hosting their web design clients pages in an effort to bring in money every month -- not just when new work comes in. They typically came to us when their other host was unresponsive to support requests, and looking for the best price. They stay for the way we support them as they support their clients and for the control panel software. We have never gone up on the price of our reseller or resold plans, in fact they went down once and grew in size and features several times. Back to the top Real vs Virtual Please don't allow us to confuse the term, "Virtual" as definitions do vary. The most strict use of the term virtual host is that which offers hosting for second level domains, the .com, .net and so on. By that definition we are a virtual host. A more recent adaptation of the term (as technology changes) is a bit more appropriate; A virtual host is one that places more than one domain per machine, but this describes nearly all web hosting today including Rosserver. This is best described as shared hosting -- as opposed to dedicated hosting which has only one client per machine. For our purpose, of more accurately describing today's hosting environment, we will refer to "virtual hosting" as the practice of sharing accounts and/or IP addresses among the many domains and "real hosting" as the practice of providing separate accounts and unique IP addresses with the lower processing overhead to direct visitors to the correct client's web site. Many hosts open one account per server for hosting. This account has one IP address. This account and IP address are then shared between all the virtual domains. Privacy and security are are breached because of the shared server account, even FTP accounts overlap and the other hosting clients have access to your files. As with this type of cheap hosting many of these bargain hosting companies overcrowd their servers and your site is slowed down by having to wait for the machine to serve pages for thousands of other web sites. At Rosserver we give each client their own account in the Linux operating system, this account is assigned it's own unique IP address. This is a more expensive method, but it is rock solid stable, faster, and a much more responsible use of system resources. Further we typically put no more than 200 clients per machine to speed access to your important pages. Back to the top Rosserver.com Hosting Rosserver.com Hosting is owned by: REM Services 112 Bienville Dr. Slidell LA 70458-1518 985-781-5224 1-800-497-HOST We are not reselling another host's service, we are not an affiliate/agent. We lease our own machines, they are not allowed to age, and they reside in the W.R. Grace Building in Baltimore Maryland, part of a huge server farm. The tech support staff that watches and maintains the servers are on duty 24/7/365 and the support staff that helps you with your concerns are the friendliest on the planet. Unlike other hosts who have huge sales departments and as few support personnel as they can get by with, we at Rosserver have no actual sales department, only support staff, we are pledged to your service, our motto is: Dedicated to providing the best hosting service, before and after the sale. Back to the top
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