Make Money from Blogs » Shared

Hosting your videos on other sites to speed up your own site

ashish — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:57:28 +0000

As a part of the process of optimization and enhancing the speed of your website, you should look to see what are some of the major media content that you can offload. Serving video files off your server can be heavier than serving plain vanilla HTML files and take far more bandwidth; and if you reach the stage where a number of people want to view the videos that you are showing, they can put a higher amount of load on your server.
One option that you can utilize is to use a video-sharing site where you can put your videos, and display the video from that site. Youtube is a very good example of such a sharing site and is a very good platform for putting your videos (it has some restrictions though, in terms of the maximum size of videos your can put, as well as the time duration of not more than 10 minute long videos).
So, take your video, get a Youtube / Gmail account, and upload your video. When your video is uploaded, you can also get a code that allows you to embed the video in your own site, and when the user views the site, they video is directly played from Youtube, and not from your site, thus optimizing your site. The plus for this is that Youtube has a lot of viewers, and if you add some site information to the video, this could in turn drive some people to your own site, people who have viewed the video directly on Youtube.

Hostmonster users – How to get an update of server status

ashish — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:33:13 +0000

Hostmonster (click here to learn more) is a popular hosting service used by individuals to host their blogs and other sites (although I have not heard of too many professional sites with huge number of users using WordPress as a hosting service). I use WordPress for my sites, and it runs fairly well, with easy installation of blogs, and other similar software. I did not have to learn much to do installation and configuration of my blogs.
However, one pet peeve I have is that the service goes down once in a while, not frequently enough to be an irritant, but I do notice once it is down (and sometimes can take 1-2 hours to come back up). At such times, it is easy enough to go to Hostmonster chat (right on the main page) to talk to somebody from support, and you can get enough detail about when the server will be back up, as well as what the problem is.
However, getting on the phone to talk to support, or to go to the chat system both take time. There is an easier way to quickly find out if there is a known problem on the server, and what the status for that problem is. There is a page called “Hostmonster Server Status Notification’ that has an update for the servers on which you have to host your sites. This page is located at this link.

Paid Hosting: Shared vs. dedicated servers

ashish — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:37:04 +0000

A majority of the people who go in for setting up their own hosting accounts go in for shared hosting, where there are a large number of people sharing the same server (typically on a Linux machine). Shared / virtual hosting packages are the default web hosting accounts for beginners and intermediate web site owners and make the most sense as well. Shared hosting means that the server on which the web hosting account resides is shared by many (typically hundreds) customers. Such a hosting method is the most popular and most economical.
What are the advantages of a shared web hosting experience vs. getting a dedicated server? You get a trouble free administration of the hosting experience (the server) since the web hoster takes care of the administration (including keeping it up, checking for software patches, etc); the profile of most users who go in for shared web hosting is such that they would not prefer to get into any kind of detail about these administration duties. Power users however often require greater control over the system, such as “shell access” which allows them to perform command line operations or to install specific software (besides ordinary – php, perl, etc. – “scripts”, which usually shared customers can install, too).
Power users will often prefer setting up a Software Virtual Server or even a Dedicated (physically real) Server, in both cases with root access to configure, remove and install whatever they want.
How do shared hosting users get to install different applications, and so on ? Well, almost all shared web hosting plans come with a specific web hosting control panel. The type of control panel offered by the hosting provider is often an important feature for intermediate web site owners since they are often used to “their” control panel (i.e. CPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin…); and they provide a convenient interface to install a variety of blogging apps, forums, shopping carts, Content Management Systems, Statistics and Reports, etc.

Types of web sites suited for shared / virtual web hosting:

Almost all web sites are suited to be run on shared web hosting accounts, with a few exceptions:

- Chat server applications: These usually consume too much server resources and require a dedicated server unless the chat is barely active.
- Wildly popular forums: These also usually require too much server resources at a certain size (i.e. hundreds of users online simultaneously).
- Other very active web sites if they are very dynamic. Dynamic sites are sites that are served live from a database on each request, opposed to “static” web sites which can serve much more visitors on the same server resources (CPU time and RAM memory) than a dynamic web site.

Some top rated web hosting providers:

Globat
vistaPages
MidPhase
BlueHost
HostExcellence
IX Web Hosting
HostMonster
HostPapa