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Webhosting & Web Servers

Understand what you pay for

Confused about your website hosting? You're not alone. The webhosting marketplace is a tangle of providers, resellers, wouldbe experts and power advertising. Services can be hard to comprehend and harder to compare. Buyer beware!
  • There are no standards for 'fast', 'secure', 'premium' or any other webhosting descriptors. There are few standards for hosting terminology.
  • Some webhosting 'features' touted to unsuspecting customers are trivial or are standard to any webhosting environment.
  • Check online reviews for financial incentives to the author, eg magazines rely on major advertisers.
  • Check the fine print. 'High speed' services might only be guaranteed to inner city businesses a few km away. That's not much use to website visitors who connect from all over Australia or the globe.

Bizazz only offers managed webhosting: we take care of every hosting need for our clients' Bizazz websites. Our clients need no webhosting technical skills or time away from their core work. It might not be the cheapest, but we reckon that managed webhosting is a practical effective solution for most businesses. Self-managed hosting may look to be the cheapest option. How important is price per month?

What matters in webhosting?

Key factors include:

  1. Server specifications that affect your website's availability, security & speed;
  2. How the server is managed: eg security, backups, extra bandwidth to allow for high traffic days;
  3. Genuine 24/7 support with fast turnaround.
What's best?

A small-medium business without its own IT staff needs maximum website performance & security with minimal input from staff & owners, who have other work to do. We believe the answer is:

  1. managed webhosting;
  2. dedicated or virtual private, scalable cloud webserver;
  3. limited access to the webserver by non technical staff.

DIY webhosting

Perhaps an IT-savvy staff member has assured you they can take charge of your website & email hosting and save you $. Do they know as much as they think they do? Will they still be working for you in a year's time, or will you be expected to pick up the reins?

If you manage your own website hosting, what will you need to do?

  • Learn your way around the webhosting interface. Understand the pro's and con's of the hosting settings & options.
  • Upgrade your site's software & (if it has them) plugins & themes when needed.
  • Solve any problems, eg failure of a website function after a software update (not uncommon).
  • Communicate on technical matters with hosting support staff.
  • Stay abreast of webhosting technology changes to keep your website secure & performing well.
  • Guard your hosting login credentials against any malicious or accidental data breach.
  • Spend time on webhosting tasks, away from your core income-generating work.

Surely it's not arrogance if I suggest that Bizazz, steered by a qualified programmer with over 25 years of webhosting experience, might do this considerably better - & make fewer costly mistakes - than the average Jo(e)?

Hosting definitions

  • Web hosting, email hosting
    +

    ...akin to renting a house or flat. You need somewhere to live, with the right resources. So does your website. So does your email account.

    Your webhost/email host provides the resources, along with a publicly known 'address' for people to visit (your website) or to send letters (emails), anytime.

  • Web server
    +

    ...a computer (hardware + software + physical connection to Internet) specially set up to 'host' websites. Your website's webserver can be anywhere in the world. The server needs to run - and have fast, reliable connection to the worldwide web - 24 hours a day, every day. A webserver can be 'visited' by 1000s of computers every day, and simultaneously transfer data to and from 100's or 1000's of computers around the world.

  • Mail server
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    ...a computer specially set up to host email services.

    Custom domain email accounts are essential for business. But not all webhosting services supply email hosting. It's easier for less technically proficient webhosts to pass the buck over to Google, Microsoft or other generic email service providers to host & manage your emails. At Bizazz, we're aware of the problems with managing business email through these generic providers. So we provide virtual dedicated email hosting for our clients through an Australian email host.

  • Managed hosting
    +

    ...where the hosting service looks after all your website or other settings on the server, updates software and makes sure the site keeps running well.

    The alternative is for you to look after your own site's hosting needs & software upgrades via your own customer interface to the server. Guess which is likely to work best?

  • DNS hosting
    +

    Your domain name has lots of 'DNS' records which connect it to the Internet and enable browsers, other mail servers & Internet users to find your website or send emails to you. Some DNS records are security-oriented; others are 'address' data.

  • Server specifications
    +

    ...affect how well your website runs.

    • server size and type, no of CPUs (we prefer solid state hard drive (SSD) & multiple CPUs for a web server)
    • speed of data transfer (how long your webpages take to load)
    • service level agreement (SLA)*
    • storage or traffic limits per website
    • redundancy**
    • security
    • backups (preferably daily)
    • who has access to the server.

    *SLA: the amount of time per month that your website might be 'down' due to server maintenance or failures. Choose a host with a high service level agreement (SLA). An SLA of 99.95% uptime sounds impressive, but it allows up to 21 minutes of downtime during any given month for server hardware or software maintenance. We reckon that's way too much time offline and it doens't say much for the provider's maintenance planning or backup systems. Bizazz's server provider has a 99.999 % uptime SLA... no more than 26 seconds per month of downtime for maintenance.

    **Redundancy: There should always be plenty of redundancy in a web server's capacity: ie extra data transfer and storage capacity beyond what is needed for normal daily running conditions. Bizazz regards a webserver as 'full' at around 70 - 75% capacity. This allows for busy days online & for websites' pages & databases to grow without affecting other sites' performance. It's tempting $wise for hosting providers to squeeze in more sites per webserver until site performance levels drop: similar to what happened with some fixed wireless Internet towers and satellites.

    You can read our server's specs here.
  • Cloud hosting
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    ... a set of servers that share hosting for a group of websites. If one server breaks down or needs maintenance, another automatically takes over. Websites continue to function on the Internet as if nothing has happened. The servers linked via cloud need not be in the same building or even the same town. Service protection through the cloud may be more effective if they are not.

    Cloud web servers are faster to set up than dedicated physical servers, and more affordable. Cloud servers are easy to expand (scale up) whenever more storage space is needed. A downside is that the cloud software itself is another place for hackers to break in or bugs to occur. If servers are in different locations, effective changeover depends on the Internet connection not being disrupted.

    In our book, well managed cloudserver is best for webhosting.

  • Dedicated server
    +

    ...a server specially set up for and managed by one user. One 'user' could mean a hosting service like ours; or a large business that has its own web server. The user controls what websites are on their server & who can access it. They choose the installed software & other server specs to best suit their needs.

  • Virtual private server (VPS)
    +

    A VPS is physically part of a larger (physical) computer, 'fenced off' from the rest by software. This is what Bizazz uses. We get many advantages of a dedicated server without the high cost of leasing all that hardware. Our clients' websites don't share their webserver with hackers, porn sites, malicious darkweb players or other dubious neighbours.

Bizazz hosting

Bizazz uses a well-run, virtual private cloudserver for our managed hosting services.

  • We lease our webserver from a reliable webserver provider with expert 24/7/365 support, monitoring & regular software updates plan.
  • We design server specs & manage the webhosting & DNS hosting for best performance of our clients' Bizazz® websites. We control how many websites are on our webserver & how much storage/bandwidth is reserved for website growth & busy days.
  • Apart from Bizazz & our server's support crew, no one can access the server backend or the main webhosting interface. A very few clients have login access to the hosting interface for their own websites.

What about our email hosting services? The mailservers and related infrastructure that our clients use, are in NEXCTDC's Tier III certified data centre in Sydney. Tier III means high security & redundancies for reliable performance.Through our Synergy Wholesale reseller login, we add or delete clients' email accounts & to obtain the mail DNS records needed for each domain.

Webhosting