There are literally thousands of sites out there that provide hosting services. So how do you differentiate the wheat from the chaff?

That decision becomes easier when you have a clear understanding of what services will be the most critical to your website and just how much performance power it needs.

Far too many hosting companies now make promises of huge amounts of server space and bandwidth to attract the unaware website owners out there. We see (and we're sure you do as well) offering such as 500 GB of server space and 5,000 GB of bandwidth for $6 - $8 monthly on a regular basis. These types of promises and those offerings that include the word 'unlimited', should wave a red flag - so be wary...

Netlocation's VHS and Hshpere Hosting Systems are designed to respond on-demand when processing power (CPU Cycles) are needed to handle incoming and outgoing requests to the servers. So when spikes in traffic are recognized, routers and load balancers with bandwidth-on-demand features, provide additional bandwidth to handle the surge in traffic without bringing the server to its knees. This is further enhanced because the infrastructure is either a cloud or clustered system which provides a near endless supply of servers dedicated to email, files and application processing such as MS SQL or MySQL and PHP or .NET.

This scalability provides a sensible and economical solution for many sites that experience heavy loads at times without the need to purchase an expensive dedicated line or virtualized and complex hosting systems. Purchasing services as they are needed provides significant savings in both the cost of a dedicated infrastructure and the support to service it properly.

A Real World Example

The Oregon School Activities Association experiences high demand for bandwidth and CPU cycles during the months of September, October, March, April and May. Here's what Jason, the site's webmaster had to say: "Our own in-house dedicated server was simply not handling the demand on the site. When we called for an RFP, we were astonished and taken back by the expense and looked to outsource our needs. We found Net Locations in February of 2008 and selected one of their Hsphere clustered high availability solutions. For the past 17 months we have experienced exceptional site performance and on the rare occassions we needed support, it was more than expected. The end result is that our website has been near flawless in performance and our overall costs are more than acceptable".

Server Space and Bandwidth

Crowded servers and overselling are today's business model for many hosting providers that promise incredible volumes of server space and bandwidth just to get your business. Many of such hosting packages offer 3000 GB of data transfer or more per month; and many offer unlimited amounts. Three thousand gigbytes of bandwith can, depending on the processes involved (static, dynamic content, etc), produce anywhere from 20 to 40 million page views monthly. Does anyone reading this actually believe that a single web site hosted on a single dedicated server for $3.95 a month with hundreds of other sites as neighbors, can handle such a load? We hope not, but many unaware site owners apparently do. Only a few sites requiring such a heavy load of server resources could bring a server to its knees. Even if your site only needed 5-10 GB of data transfer monthly, then why would you host it in such an unstable environment? You will experience poor site performance which will in turn reflect on your businesses bottom line.

The fact is that these offering are nothing more than lost leaders designed to draw in new business with the hope of upselling customers to more powerful hosting packages.

Why risk your online business to such practices? When clustered and cloud hosting services are available to you for just $6 or so more a month. Do you want your databases to crash or your media files to hang or not load at all? Net Locations provides you with affordable and powerful hosting solutions for your business - whether you have one employee or five hundred!!

The Answer is Obvious!

Processing power (CPU Cycles) is the one needed resource to allow your site's applications and other files to load and run smoothly at normal times and to scale up on-demand when needed, so your site visitors enjoy a trouble free visit to your site.

It's Net Locations advanced hosting systems and our commitment to an undersold infrastructure that has allowed us to maintain site uptimes in the 99.8% range and 100% system uptimes for many years.