In today’s society, with the Internet reaching almost every home and business, the number of people wanting to have a Website is dramtically increasing. The questions is - How do I get my site on the Internet? The answer is Web Hosting. Web Hosting by definition is a service that allows individuals and organisations to publish their website via the World Wide Web. There are many differnet types of Web Hosting, all with unique features and specifications. Shared Hosting is where your site resides on a section of a server that is conected to the Internet. This type of Hosting is most common amongst indivduals and Small to Medium Businesses (SME).

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are partinitoned areas of a Dedicated Server that have similar capabilities as a Dedicated Server without the cost. This type of Hosting is more common for larger, more complex sites or where the customer needs a particular feature, such as a Control Panel. Finally there is Dedicated Servers. These are generally reserved for high traffic sites that require their own server to operate.

There are many options available to both individuals and organisations alike, and it can often be quite a daunting task to choose what type of Web Hosting is correct for you. If you are confused by the whole idea of Web Hosting, or would just like to discuss what options are available to you, Global Gold and their dedicated support team will be glad to assist.

For some companies, a Dedicated Server appears too much of a leap from their existing Virtual Private Server (VPS). The need to increase reliability and performance is often outweighed by the rising cost of moving to a Dedicated Server. A Virtual Machine (VM) therefore, is a very effective alternative. VM Hosting is a very reliable and cost effective solution, that has the added benefit of being more environmentally friendly. A Virtual Machine would be an ideal solution for companies looking to update their old, out of date Dedicated Server equipment, as well as growing companies who want to expand their business without encompassing spiralling costs. With the same configuration and flexibility as a Dedicated Server, a VM is able to run just as smoothly on a Windows 2003 operating system as it is Redhat Linux, Redhat Fedora or Debian operating system.

In business it is of course important to have contingencies. A business will typically have a backup printer or have temporary staff they can call upon in a crisis. Why do they have these contingencies in place? A good manager would have identified the risk and spent time, prior to the risk actually turning into a problem, preparing a contingency plan for when the expected problems arise.

It is the same for data contingencies. A mirrored RAID system is great for backing up and preventing loss of data. However what happens if data placed onto a RAID system is overwritten by mistake with invalid data or the data is deleted? Ultimately these problems described occur through human error. They are though, real risks that have to be identified and managed.

A RAID system will not help in these scenarios, because a RAID system has no sense of time. They will only help a business to retrieve the data that was on them at the point in time that one of their hard disks fail. Whether that data is correct or not is another matter because, for example, 3 weeks earlier a member of staff might have deleted some crucial data by mistake.

The solution is to deploy a point-in-time backup system that backs up the data that is held in the RAID array to a third party device or hard disk at specified intervals. When a business discovers that its current data is not valid it can “roll back the clock” and look at that data at an earlier point in time. How far back the backup system can go depends on the backup system’s available memory.

For larger businesses that have hundreds of Gigabytes of data and who want to be able to roll back up to 7 years, this might sound expensive. There are some products available that can perform differential backups, which means it only backs up the sections of the data that have changed since the last backup. Which saves a lot of backup hard disk space.