In shared hosting, the most common reason for downtime is a single account slowing down other accounts on the server. CloudLinux helps control this by isolating and controlling resource spikes. ?CloudLinux utilizes a technology to set resource limits per user. This ensures an user account can never use more than the resources given to them.

We have deployed CloudLinux on our latest server, fayrfax.hosting-nation.com and it has worked well. Look for it to come to other servers later in the year. If you have any questions about CloudLinux at Hosting Nation, contact info@hosting-nation.com.

I get to chat with customers on Twitter, Facebook, the blog and the forums, and a lot of my interactions have been about pricing: “I used to get X server for Y, but now it costs Z.” The trouble is that it’s tough to compare many of the offerings apples-to-apples.

If you were to create an apples-to-apples server comparison, you’d see that a SoftLayer server is the equivalent of a server from The Planet with a KVM, a private network, additional geographic network points of presence, increased network capacity, the ability to select where you want your server provisioned, faster provisioning, seamless integration with cloud solutions, and a lot more automation… And these are just the differences that came to me as I was writing.

And after having the type of service Softlayer provides us and our customers, using a “low cost” server datacenter isn’t quite the same. And let me tell you that KVM can be a godsend sometimes. Softlayer has our business because they do it right.

In this part, we’re going to discuss some of the canned and affordable options available for non-existent and low budgets.  Custom design and development easily costs thousands of dollars, so it’s best left to another conversation.  For now, let’s start with the no-budget scenario.

The no-budget website is suitable for individuals and community organizations with limited funding.  Notice how I excluded small businesses?  We’ll get to that in a minute.

No-Budget Solutions

WordPress (hosted), Blogspot, TypePad – if you want free, you’ll be limited to blogs or other similar platforms.  While there are other free options available that work off of subdomains and other trickery, I’m loathe to recommend them as you never know if they’ll be there in a year or two, and you could lose all of your data.  Plus, free isn’t always free.  With Homestead and Vistaprint (and a million others like them), you get a ‘Free’ website when you purchase other materials.

If you happen to be a non-profit, check out Tech Soup for resources and downloads available specifically for non-profit organizations.

Low Budget Solutions

There are hundreds of solutions for under $500 (too many to list here).  The common theme is that they all start with a shared hosting account (valued at $100).  From there, you can install WordPress or Joomla (both for free), get a free or premium template (templates start at about $20 and range to just over $100) and so far, you’re still under $200.

If you are a small, local business, most of your clients probably come from referrals and good word of mouth, but your visitors still need a place to get a snapshot of your business.  If you use a no-budget solution, people will judge your business accordingly.

Web development takes two things, money and time, each to varying degrees.  The more time you’re willing to spend, generally speaking, the less it will cost.  To keep your costs down, you can learn to do much of the work yourself (something I do) or you can use a free or low cost solution, one that gets you started.   Don’t think that you have to spend thousands of dollars, there are a lot of solutions for under $500 out there including our My First Website plan which comes with one year of shared hosting, a free domain and a fully loaded website based on the WordPress platform for only $199.

Want to learn about more of our sub-$500 solutions?  Let us know!  Contact Hosting Nation to get started today.

The scope of the project was to create a web site for Leo that would be the foundation for her web presence as well as answer three questions we thought visitors would ask.   “Who is Leo Sawicki?”, “What is Leo Sawicki doing?” and “How can I connect with Leo Sawicki?”

The site uses a smooth streamlined design to bring visitors in where they can interact with Leo on her blog, read articles, view photos and follow Leo around the world as well as connect with her on the popular sites Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn.  Visitors can also browse through Leo’s publications and even purchase them from the online bookstore, built custom by Hosting Nation.

Visit www.leosawicki.com now to browse Leo’s website, and visit www.hosting-nation.com/design-community for details on this, and other projects we’ve worked on.

Screenshot of the homepage for www.leosawicki.com.

There are over 10 tutorials in series one including:

Advanced Poll
Account Lab Plus
4Images Gallery
Crafty Syntax Live Help
b2Evolution
Coppermine Photo Galley
Moodle
Mambo
Help Center Live
Geeklog
Gallery

You can view the tutorials here.  Stay tuned for more video tutorials when Hosting Nation launches series two!

Shiloh, our corporate mascot, was adopted from the BC SPCA in 2005 by Hosting Nation GM Rick Lawrence.

Hosting Nation is more than just hosting for humans, we’re all animal lovers too.  Serious animal lovers.  So much so that our servers (Dorian and Roma) are named after one of Randy’s alpacas and his dog respectively  (Randy is our system administrator).

That’s why we chose the BC SPCA as a cause that we could all agree on.  We want to get involved in the community in a way that most people can identify with, and it’s tough to find someone who hasn’t been touched by the SPCA in some way while living on Vancouver Island.

So we’re announcing our “Pennies for Pets” promotion.  During the months of February and March 2009, 50% of all revenue from new or transferred hosting accounts will go to Central and North Vancouver Island BC SPCA organizations.  It’s our goal to raise $10,000.00 in donations for the BC SPCA, which means we need a total of 200 individuals to sign up for or switch their hosting to Hosting Nation by the deadline on March 31st 2009.

Just 200.  I don’t want to start saying things like “For Just Pennies a Day” and “For Less than a Cup of Coffee a Day”, but believe me – I will, I’m not above that sort of thing at all.  Our “Hosting for Everyone” package gives you 5Gb of storage space, 50Gb of bandwidth and a whole ton of add-ons and extras alongside awesome support for just $8.95 CAD per month.  Did we mention that half of that goes to a worthy cause?  Well it does.

No excuses citizens, we’re taking them all out of the way.  If you have hosting, it’s no problem.  We’ll credit any hosting account that you transfer to Hosting Nation with the remainder of time on your current hosting plan (up to one year).

And all you have to do is forgo 2 of your quad venti doubleshot caramel macchiatos each month.  You’ll be helping support small business in the Central Vancouver Island region and contributing to a great cause.

Visit www.hosting-nation.ca/spca for complete details of the Pennies for Pets promotion.

A lot has happened for us.  New office, new logo, new website with new features.  A lot of lessons learned the hard way.  (we’ll be talking about our new design and some of those hard lessons in our upcoming segment “Behind the Servers – How Hosting Nation found it’s groove”.  It’s a working title, but there will be a segment, stay tuned).

After the dust settled, we pushed the button to go live last week.  Which brings us to today, and what’s in it for you.

Sign up for our “Hosting for Everyone” web hosting package before January 31st, 2009 and receive an 8gb USB Flash drive.  The only criteria you need to receive a USB Flash Drive are:

• You must sign up for one years’ hosting.  That includes both transfers and new hosting accounts.
• You must sign up before midnight on January 31st, 2009.

Our “Hosting for Everyone” package provides 5gb of disk space alongside 50gb of data transfer alongside our awesome addons and support services.  Read more about our hosting for everyone plan here.

You can read the complete details of the promotion here. Remember, to receive a free USB flash drive you have to sign up for web hosting by midnight PST on January 31st, 2009.

As a result of an automated mail system update in the early hours of Tuesday, November 25th, Hosting Nation Clients would have been unable to send or receive email.

The specific reason for this was that after the update, the mail system defaulted to a simple default configuration leaving out custom settings. As a result port 26 was disabled; and there were some problems with sender address verification.

At this time, the issue has been repaired – and you should be able to send and receive email as normal. We do know what caused the issue, and are certain we can prevent it from happening again. To verify whether an email was sent, you can check your ‘sent items’. If the message is showing as sent then it got through. If you received a ‘message rejected’ response, or the mail came back to you – it will have to be sent again. We regret any inconveniences this may cause you in your day to day business dealings.

We would really like to be able to promise 100% uptime with no outages or issues, but we simply don’t feel that’s possible. What we can promise is that 100% of the time we are committed to providing increasingly better levels of service and stability, and that when issues arise we are equally committed to resolving them as quickly as possible – most always within 12 hours or less.

As a service to clients, we are constantly working on our knowledge base – located at http://support.hosting-nation.com. In the event that you experience any issues with website outages or issues, we encourage you to submit a ticket to our helpdesk – we endeavour to respond to all tickets within the hour and resolve all issues within 24 hours.

Although we have yet to decide on this software’s backup scheduling policy, The CDP solution can create recovery points every few minutes in a short amount of time. It also has a nice web GUI for our administrators and support staff to browse down and restore even a single file.

We will also be taking advantage of the MySQL addon that allows us to restore at the database or even table level from “consistent point-in-time block level snapshots of running MySQL instances.”

The staff and I are really excited about adding this technology.  Keep your eyes on Hosting Nation over the next couple of weeks for an announcement on how you can have access to this great new feature.

Randall Donald is the system administrator for Hosting Nation Data Inc.  Hosting Nation provides hosting packages and hosted applications to everyone.