W8 Hosting Solutions

Today, we got reviewed by Web Hosting Search, an independent web hosting review site. Taken straight from their review:

W8 Hosting Solutions‘ motto is to provide customers an affordable, customer-focused, quality web hosting solutions. While not as brandable as Hostgator or Bluehost, they indeed delivered on their promises.

What can I say - We are honoured and would like to thank you, our valued customers for making this possible.

Read the full review here.

For starters, our economy isn’t in a great shape. With a $700 billion bailout package from the government, the aim is to restore confidence to the credit market by allowing the Treasury to buy troubled assets that are threatening economic infrastructure. This also means we could face the possibility of paying higher income tax. It is still unclear on how much more we could be forking out should the bill be passed, but things does look unsettling.

However, fret not. No matter how unsettling the market, the online industry is still holding its’ ground. Google have recently just enhanced its search-indexing algorithms. This is good news for all of us who practise good SEO techniques.

If you want to check how well you rank on your SERP (Search Engine Rank Position), try this little tool from 4neurons.com >> Download File

If you are doing your own SEO, here are some updates applicable for Google.com:

Link Popularity
Focus more on your inbound links rather than your outbound links.

Domain Age
The older the domain is, the better authority it has. Or so it is stated by Google. So, for you to rank amongst the top 10, the age of your domain name comes into factor.

Page Rank
This is an indicator on how popular your website is in terms of the amount of inbound links you are getting from external websites. Therefore translating to better authority and search ranks.

The factors above are already well known among fellow SEO, but just so happens Google updated it to have more impact overall.

You can now purchase domain names from us. After previous delays and some technical issues, we finally have the chance to roll out our domain name registration service for your benefit.

Not only are the domains affordable, but you get to choose from a wide variety of domain TLDs such as .com, .net, .org, .us, .biz, .info, .name and premium ccTLDs (country-specific domains) like .co.in, za.com, se.com, se.net, and us.com.

I particularly like the “.se.com” extension; it sounds just like the Japanese security company selling anti-theft devices. Just imagine the possibilities! - security.se.com, protectme.se.com, solid.se.com…

So, what are you waiting for? Signup for your favourite domain names now before someone else do. Prices starts from a low $12.95 a year. Use our special discount coupon, DOMAINOFFER, to further reduce your savings to a whopping $8.95 per domain (save $4.00).

GET YOUR PERSONALISED DOMAIN NAME HERE

There are already too many topics touching on unlimited web hosting; saying that it is just a gimmick, a marketer’s strategy and so the list grows. Let us not litter the internet with such topics anymore. Instead, allow me to share with you on the technical (not) possibilities of unlimited web hosting.

The Hardware Setup

To begin with, we have to look at a typical web hosting infrastructure. There are the domain name server or DNS, web (http) server, database server, mail server and backup server. They are all interconnected and are the things needed to keep your website up and running 24/7, all year round. Some setups can take up more servers per cluster, while others need only a minimum number to be functional.

When you access your website, the browser locates and retrieves your site’s DNS from the server, where it then connects to your web, database and mail servers to display the necessary files on the browser. Most of your web files are located on the web server and anything you store will be in that particular server.

Sounds simple, isn’t it?

It is simple, until maybe, when the server box runs out of space within its structural casing to house additional storage media. You see, a server is just like your desktop computer. Just like it, you can keep on adding hard-drives until the casing has no more room for you to add anything.

So, with this simple fact, we know that there is no such thing as unlimited storage.

However, that is an overly simplistic view of a web hosting architecture setup. There are other setups, and an alternative is the storage area network. This setup gives you the possibility of having unlimited storage.

The Storage Area Network

Or SAN for short. A typical SAN setup looks something like the diagram below:

What it does is actually connects an array of storage media to form a single server fabric, allowing you to access these array of virtual drives as if it is a single large hard-drive. You get to find where you store your files from within using a special SAN controller switch. Anytime you run out of storage space, all you need to do is plug in another drive and your hard-drive instantly increases its capacity.

Excellent. Which means the conclusion we draw up earlier just becomes false. To a certain extend, yes.

The Dilemma

Here is where it gets interesting. Although it is possible to setup the architecture into a SAN system, it is business-logically unwise. You see, a SAN setup is not cheap. It could setback the web hosting company hundreds of thousand dollars. Whereas, your web hosting account is only $5 monthly. Even with a large customer-base, at $60 ($5 x 12 months) yearly per customer, it is unlikely the company returned its investments within 5 years.

Also, with other operational, advertising and marketing costs to bear, the company will not see profits for years to come, resulting in a chain reaction, from getting support from cheap unqualified personnel, to the inability of the company to replace malfunctioning hardware. Eventually as the customer, you suffer from poor service.

Maybe in the near future when storage area network has become a commodity, we can all enjoy unlimited web hosting at a quality service level we can agree on, but for now, unlimited web hosting is just not a business-wise decision.