Sub Domains ? Perfect Solution for Multiple Website Hosting

In the prevailing scenario, several business owners find themselves in a dilemma over the routes to make the most of their company’s web site. This is particularly factual for those who are having requirement to maintain more than one web site but do not want to pay for multiple hosting accounts. If the above condition is applicable on a user then the probable answer will be subdomain.

The term Subdomain is defined to be a sort of a site inside a site. They are not, though, simply supplementary pages of an existing web site. The subdomain is possessed to have a web site all of its own, which is totally completely split from the site situated at the prime domain name.

If a user need to recognize the use and purpose of subdomains, it may be essential to primarily recognize the notion of an Internet domain name. Every web site that is dynamic on the Internet (and there are factually billions of them currently present – it was estimated as long before as 1996 that the no. of web pages are comparatively more than there were people on Earth) possess an inimitable domain name. The domain name, however, is in fact just a route for humans to transmit to the site. Internet servers observe web site names as distinctive I.P. addresses. It is the role played by the domain name server that translates those numbers into names and back again.

One can say that a subdomain is merely an offshoot of one’s web site’s domain. However by the condition it appears on the server, there is nothing wrong in saying that subdomain is purely a folder rather than a sub directory positioned inside one’s domain’s root directory. Any sub directory can play the role of a sub domain. Like for instance, if one’s web site is “www.nishad.com” and the user stock up the images for his/her site in a directory called “images,” then if the user wish can create a subdomain at “images.nishad.com”. Given that one places an “index.html” page in the folder one should be competent to pull it up in a web browser that that fashion. For the majority of cases the user will develop a new sub directory to be allied with a subdomain and few of the web hosts does not favor subdomains on their respective servers or restrict the number of subdomains one may allied with his/her site.

The merits of applying subdomains as against to opening multiple hosting accounts is double. The top most virtue is that, one receives the obvious benefit of only need to pay for one hosting account. The second is that, the user will be in benefit of possessing a completely identical web site, but one that one’s customers will simply distinguish as being linked in some way or the other with his/her business. A number of companies will set up subdomains for assorted divisions (for e.g.abc.com may also have sales.abc.com or rather say, support.abc.com) and a few will utilize subdomains for a variety of businesses that entirely interlinked branches of the identical parent company.

That alliance would be a drawback toward utilizing subdomains too. If one wants to keep an association between his/her companies under covers (for e.g. Disney’s attempt to do with Touchstone Pictures several years ago), then he/she requires employing multiple accounts instead of subdomains.

Web Hosting With Multiple Servers – Impact on a Website?s Uptime

By this article one can get to know about the technology used in multiple server hosting as well as how to utilize it to maximize one’s site and security and uptime

Now the hosting of site has converted into a commodity where competition has raised to a very higher level and it’s very difficult to discriminate among the hosting plans on the basis of core plans, features and prices. Moreover choosing a host based on the cheapest price is not a better idea rather it thereafter proves to be very expensive in terms of reliability as well as possible loss of sales as a result of website downtime.

Choosing a best out of thousands of providers and resellers is a very scary task, which is rather based on hit and trial method. Even if hosting has become a commodity still while choosing for new host one should look for reliability.

Now at the heart of any hosting company’s reliability is redundancy. Redundancy offers an alternative remedy in case any problem occurs. This is to ensure continuity of work as seamlessly and transparently as possible.

There are several hosts, which employ redundant network connections. These are the high-speed pipes that route data from the server to one’s web browser. As against this, redundant ‘multiple web servers’ are quite rare and expensive and so are rarely used. They are expensive due to use of costly routing equipment, which has previously been used, only in mission critical applications of Fortune 500 companies.

There is yet another very neat but little known Domain Name Server (DNS) feature called ’round robin’ which allows the selection and provision of a particular IP address from a ‘pool’ of addresses when a DNS request arrives.

The Domain Name Server (DNS) database maps a host name to their IP address. Thus instead of remembering a vast series of numbers (IP address) one can just type in his/her web browser www.mydomain.com, to get to one’s website.

Now in order to publicize DNS info throughout the market it will typically take minimum 2 to 3 days. That is the reason when one registers or transfer a domain name it isn’t immediately available to the person browsing the web.

This delay has foiled the security benefits of hosting one’s site on multiple servers, as the site would be down for a couple of days in case of any problem with one server. As a remedy one has to change his/her DNS to reflect the second server and has to wait for several days before the change was picked up in routers on the Internet.

There is yet another solution for the above problem i.e. the round robin DNS strategy that solves this quandary, by mapping one’s domain name to more than one IP address.

One should now select that hosting companies which employs the DNS round robin technique in conjunction with’failover monitoring’.

The DNS round robin fail over monitoring process starts by a web hosting company setting up one’s site on two or more independent web servers. Thus one’s domain name will therefore have 2 or more IP Addresses assigned to it.

Thereafter the fail over monitor watches one’s web server(s) by dispatching data to a URL one specifies and looks for particular text in the results. Now when an error is returned from one of an IP address, it pulls that IP address out of the list. The DNS thereafter points one’s domain name to the working IP address/s

In case any of the user’s IP’s come back online they are restored to the IP pool. This helps in effectively and safely keeping one’s site online even if one of the web servers is down.

In this case an average failure detection and recovery time with a system is very low with just 15 minutes. However this time varies depending on site’s speed as well as the nature of the failure and also how long other ISP’s cache (save) one’s DNS information.

The time taken for other ISP’s caching one’s information can be manipulated in the fail over monitor by lowering the “time to live” (TTL) cache settings. These are the settings used by other ISP’s in order to determine how long to cache one’s DNS information.

One must also keep in mind the matter of how frequently data is synchronized between his/her website’s servers. Now this comes under the hosting company’s responsibility, and this becomes complicated where databases and user sessions are involved.

The most elegant solution to multi server hosting is very expensive hardware based fail over monitoring systems that point a virtual IP address to other ISP’s, while behind the scenes juggling a number of unique IP addresses on different servers.

This way, the whole issue of ISP’s caching one’s information does not come into play.

Thus in order to get 99.99995% uptime, without spending big amount of money, the technology is readily available and certain proprietary failure monitoring systems are now relatively cheap to apply.

Reducing Hosting Costs Via Multiple Domain Hosting

In case the user is the owner of several websites, then multiple domain hosting is surely going to benefit him/her in reducing hosting costs. The benefit of multiple hosting is that it allows user to host more than one website on a single hosting account. Thus one can have several website at a cost of one.

In general users instead of purchasing a website purchases a hosting account. There are cases where hosting account can only be used to host a single domain and hence a single website while in other cases the account can be used to host multiple domains and hence multiple websites.

As with everything there are pros and cons in case of hosting several domains on a single hosting account.

Pros:

Talking about advantages the first and fore most advantage is surely cost. It is really cost effective to select an account offering multiple domain hosting as here in this case user gets benefits of many websites at cost of just one. It is quite cheaper way of hosting multiple websites instead of purchasing a hosting account for individual website. Example just consider a hosting provider offering a simple hosting package for mere cost of £70 per annum and U.K. domains for just £2.00 per annum. Thus now for hosting four websites using separate accounts the cost will be £70 *4 + 4*2 i.e. £288 per annum. And now with a single account and multiple domains the cost would be £70 + £2.0 *4 which comes to around £78 per annum. Thus the saving is clearly of £210 per annum.

Cons:

After advantages we are coming on the bad side. The biggest drawback is that traffic for each site is usually counted together against the single hosting account and if one’s websites are getting popular then one has to expand bandwidth as well as disk space limits. Not only that the user will find that the log files that are provided to him/her, now allow him/her to distinguish between the domains as all the traffic is counted against a single domain only.

If we talk about the hosting account it has a single password and hence the user can after logging once can administer each domain personally. Thus each and every domain should belong to the user.

Now a very important question arises that who needs multiple domain hosting? The answer is quite simple, anyone who is in need of multiple websites with their own individual domain name different from others will consider this type of hosting account.

If one is just intending to host a single domain or website then he/she should not discard the idea rather there are cases where it costs usually less in comparison to single domain hosting solutions. As non-a-days reselling of mini websites and website is getting popular day by day, there are several hosting companies specializing solely in providing multiple domain hosting and in addition offering good amount of discount depending up on the number of domains one is intending to host.

There are several multiple domain hosting providers having the caliber to significantly lower down one’s hosting costs, however in case of selecting any hosting provider one needs to be very careful and act wisely. There are several companies available and user should take his/her own time in selecting the best among them.

One should not just go for the cheapest rather should go for the one, which is best.

Is There A Site That Allows You To Buy & Maintain Multiple Domain Names And Have Free Web Hosting As Well?

I am looking to buy some domain names, but would like to purchase them from the same place that will host them. Is there a site out there that will allow me to purchase my domain names and get free hosting for them as well? I have already found bravehost, but would like to compare it with other similar sites. I have not been able to find any. Does anyone know of where I might be able to purchase domain names and get free hosting as well?