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If you want your business online, you must have secure, dependable website hosting. You essentially rent space on a physical server when you sign up for a web hosting service, where you may keep all the files and information required for your website to function properly. The server publishes your website online to the world wide web.
The different types of hosting reflect the evolutionary development of web publishing technology with the oldest solutions dealt with first.
Dedicated hosting refers to the physical server (or servers) that are assigned to a single corporate client. The product is entirely in the consumer's hands, giving them the freedom to alter it to meet their own needs—including those related to performance and security.
The cost of the server and its maintenance is the greatest hurdle with a dedicated server. Capex can be in the range of R250K for an entry level server and software. Replacement of hardware, and software licensing and upgrades are also a big factor over the life of the hosting solution.
Furthermore, the client is entirely responsible for the management of the server, requiring considerable in-house expertise.
Colocation hosting is rapidly spreading in popularity as companies become more reliant on their IT infrastructure and realize how important it is to always have access to secure data. Many businesses don't want the burden of having to regularly maintain and monitor their equipment, while others lack the resources or technical know-how to do it themselves.
The business rents rack space within a highly secure data centre. The rental agreement may also include the rental of servers, other equipment, server monitoring and bandwidth. Although there is little to no capex, this is still a relatively expensive solution because the business must still pay for servicers and have the expertise to manage the solution.
Through shared hosting, sometimes referred to as virtual hosting, your website can be hosted on a single physical server that also provides services to other websites. There are computer programs on the server that facilitate managing and using your website.
This is cheapest hosting service and may be attractive from that point of view alone. However, the hosting company providing you space on the server, is still not responsible for the health and performance of your website. You will still need to pay for the development and maintenance of your own solution.
Although there are exceptions, most shared hosting providers do not offer any support for your website maintenance and will not be able to deal with any technical issues your website may develop over time. You are on your own here.
In addition, you are limited by what the shared hosting provider allows in terms of server settings, because the server is shared by many clients like yourself. You will be limited on the space and bandwidth you use, and this determines the cost of the service you get.
Virtual private server (VPS) hosting sits somewhere between shared hosting and collocated hosting. Clients may feel limited by the resources available with shared hosting, but not see the need for the expense of a dedicated server. They might eventually require a more potent hosting choice as their site develops and needs more functions and resources.
Between shared hosting and a dedicated hosting solution, where your website is hosted on its own server, a virtual private server (VPS) is typically seen as a steppingstone. A VPS server is still a more expensive option because you are still responsible for the upkeep of the server.
The popularity of cloud hosting has soared in recent years. The "Divide and Rule" principle underlies cloud hosting: the resources required to manage the website are distributed among numerous servers and used as-needed. This decreases the possibility of any downtimes in the event of a server issue.
There is no Capex with Cloud hosting and you are free to upgrade or downgrade the server requirements as you see fit. In addition, the server software can be upgraded simply by moving to a new cloud instance at any time.
Another advantage of Cloud hosting is that you can add resources – computing power, memory, disk space and bandwidth at any time, removing the limited set capacity of dedicated server solutions.
When hosting is managed, the server, computer hardware, and software are under the daily management of the web host. Normally, a client leases hardware and other operational elements as part of a service agreement. The experience of getting application-level management is similar to walking on a red carpet. When they come across a platform that loads swiftly, dependably, and smoothly, it will also seem that way for visitors to your website.
ITM - Information Technology Media design and host business websites that are
Our clients are SMMEs – ranging from the smallest to relatively large businesses. We generally refrain from business with large enterprises. Our role instead is to provide IT hosting and services for clients who cannot afford the in-house resources of large corporations.
Typically, our clients do not have the expertise or the manpower to manage their own hosting. IT is not part of their core business. They also do not have the capital to own and maintain expensive IT hosting infrastructure.
With Xneelo, we provide website hosting for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MYSQL and PHP) stack solutions like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, but our main hosting client is for DNN Software, an open-source, ASP.Net, content management platform for Windows. This requires MSSQL Server and IIS running on a Windows Server. Currently we host over 250 DNN websites.
DNN Hosting make it possible to run multiple websites concurrently on the same server instance, reducing the load on the server, leading to faster server response times, and enabling the sharing of software resources over multiple websites.
This brings cost reductions in the deployment of website functionality and rapid upgrade ability across all websites simultaneously.
We make integral use of Cloudflare DNS (Domain Name Server) and CDN (Content Delivery Network) services. Cloudflare makes ITM websites more secure and faster. Furthermore, Cloudflare’s CDN and global point of presence, means that your website loads quickly wherever it is access around the world.
We also use local South Africa Cloud Servers. This means we can get high performance servers with the latest server technology when this becomes available. We also use enterprise level cloud solutions for the best server performance.
We provide a managed hosting service on the DNN Software platforms at a cost that is still competitive with normal unmanaged hosting providers. We look after the website server infrastructure as well as the health of all the websites on the server.
This means we can apply upgrades to the core CMS as well as the modules/plugins installed on the hosting instance when required. In addition, because the hosting is managed, we are actively engaged in monitoring and fixing hosting issues as they arise.
This extends the life of your website and protects your website against technical obsolesence and security flaws.
Server maintenance is essential if you want your website(s) to perform optimally. In addition it is important that you have a tried and tested backup solution at all times.
We provide daily management and monitoring of our servers as well as daily backups using RedStor – an enterprise backup solution for all Windows Server Hosting clients.
For email hosting, ITM makes use of Xneelo.co.za mail server hosting. Xneelo is the largest hosting provider in South Africa.
If you find it daunting to understand the type of hosting you may need, get in touch with us and we will guide you to the best hosting solution according to your unique business model.
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