No Such Thing as Free Lunch (or Web Hosting)
You don’t need to be computer wizard to own a website. You don’t have to know much about XHTML, servers, or SQL injection attacks. “Great!” you say. However, as with anything that costs your business money, you should make sure you understand what your actual needs are, prior to writing the check.
Free Hosting!
Wouldn’t that be great? There actually are companies you can find on the Web that will “give” away hosting and let you get your website up and running without having to pay a penny. The problem is that it’s not really free. In exchange for not charging you for the hosting, your website will be required to display advertising which the hosting company then sells (of which you don’t get a penny.) Many “free” hosting companies also require that your site’s address (domain name) be an extension of their own. For example, www.example.com/sites/yourcompanyname/ instead of www.yourcompanyname.com. This dilutes your own company’s image and branding.
Even if you’re okay with not having your own domain name, and sharing advertising space on your site, you may want to consider the full effect this could have on the image of your business. The next time you visit your favorite restaurant, imagine what it’d be like if, to save on costs, they’d sold advertising space on their signs, menus, table-tops, napkins, and windows. Then imagine if their competitors had purchased some of that ad space. Not a great impression. And like a restaurant, your website is an experience (good or bad) for each visitor.
The same arguments can be made for email addresses. While using the free email services available through AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and others can be great for individuals, why waste the marketing opportunity for your business? Every time you send an email out from your Yahoo email account, you’re advertising for Yahoo, and reinforcing Yahoo’s brand instead of yours. Why not let your business benefit instead? Make sure all your email comes from you@yourcompanyname.com. (Well, not literally. Use your own company’s domain name.)
How About UNLIMITED Bandwidth And Disk Space?
Nope. It’s a popular trend in the very competitive hosting business to set up hosting plans that offer unlimited (usually shown in capital letters to make sure you see it) disk space and monthly bandwidth. (Bandwidth is the measurement of the amount of traffic your website can use each month.)
While it sounds like a good deal, it is an impossible promise for the hosting company to keep. No hosting company in the world has an unlimited number of servers, or an unlimited capacity to handle unlimited bandwidth. What they are counting on is that most people don’t use their full monthly allotment of bandwidth, or all their available disk space that comes with their hosting plans. That means the companies can “oversell” the number of people on their servers, by pretending there’s more space and bandwidth than are technically available. However, if you tried to take them up on the offer of “unlimited” you’d quickly find out (and it’s usually in the fine print of their service contracts) that there are phrases like “reasonable use” that will suddenly apply to you and cause limits to suddenly exist. Technically this amounts to false advertising, but no one seems to be calling the hosting companies on it yet.
Don’t be fooled. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and you do typically get what you pay for.
How Much You Should Spend On Hosting
Does your business need to have website access and functioning email 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Is it critical to your business that large numbers of people can visit your site at one time, without crashing the server? If you’re a small business but answered “yes” to these questions, you may be disappointed to know that the most commonly used hosting solutions are probably not for you.
Dedicated Hosting
If your website is “mission critical” you should probably invest in what’s called a “dedicated” server. This means that your website gets it’s very own server, and doesn’t have to share resources (memory, performance, etc.) with other websites. Dedicated servers are not cheap, and start around a couple of hundred dollars a month. The differences in cost are most often the quality of the hardware, and the amount of monitoring and service that come with the package. These types of hosting plans will often include setup fees and software licensing fees.
Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
A slightly cheaper version of these types of plans are “virtual private servers” (or VPS). These are created by taking a dedicated server and setting up several virtual servers running side by side—each with it’s own website and operating system supporting it. While you share the physical server, each site still gets its own resources. The cost is less because you’re sharing some of the expense, but you still have individual control over the complete environment your website lives in.
Shared Hosting
Most of the hosting you see advertising for is called “shared” hosting. It’s cheap, because essentially you share the server (both physically and all the software resources) with any number of other website owners. While the cost is nice, it’s less reliable than a dedicated server, because you never know if one of the other site owners you’re sharing the server with is sending out tons of spam, setting up phishing websites, or otherwise misbehaving. Since your website shares the same server IP address as these unknown potential hooligans, you share in that IP’s reputation around the Web.
People who abuse hosting can also cause the server to freeze by running memory intensive scripts and programming, and if the server crashes, your site does too. Even someone doing nothing illegal can bring a server down, just by creating a site that becomes wildly popular. If your website shares their server, the more their website uses of the server’s memory and performance, the less there is available for yours.
Which Type Of Hosting Is Right For You
So how much to spend? It depends on what you need. Most small business websites will do just fine on a shared hosting plan. How much disk space and bandwidth you need will depend on what your website does, and may change over time. But if your business relies completely on your website, or you find yourself featured in national media (so now everyone in the country wants to visit your site) or are a fast growing company, you may want to go in for a dedicated server.
Make sure your hosting is part of the conversation you have with your website designer or development professional, and don’t be afraid to ask questions.
Nathan Lyle
http://www.articlesbase.com/web-hosting-articles/no-such-thing-as-free-lunch-or-web-hosting-697449.html
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Are the Mexican ever happy Students protest violent speech at MSU- Latino group wants ban on certain speakers?
A Latino student group is rallying against what they call free speech violations at Michigan State University.
About 30 representatives from Chicanos y Latino Unidos (CLU), along with members of several other organizations, met for about a half hour earlier this week on the steps of MSU’s Hannah Administration Center to "challenge the university into having them take a stand about … what the difference is between freedom of speech and hate speech, fighting words and violent speech," CLU President Gabriela Alcazar said.
Specifically, CLU wants MSU officials to disallow another student organization – Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) – from hosting speakers who "speak against minorities" and "instigate and threaten people and insult people," said Alcazar, 20, who originally is from Imlay City.
"There’s a point where they don’t have the right to say the things they’ve been saying," said the international relations and social relations and policy major. CLU wants the university "to begin drawing a line and not keep covering everything with freedom of speech."
MSU’s chapter of YAF has made news for various events, including an anti-immigration forum last year during which violence broke out.
The student organization was recently listed as a hate group by Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights law firm.
Kyle Bristow, MSU’s chairman of YAF, attended the event. "Free speech is a God-given right, and a group of 13 people who disagree with that are not going to take that right from us," said the 20-year-old international relations major. "We’re contributing to intellectual diversity."
Bristow said he believes the rally was to protest an upcoming YAF event.
YAF has invited Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies to speak against illegal immigration from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. today at room 102 in Conrad Hall, Bristow said.
"Terrorists and bad people can get in, and that’s why it’s an extremely important issue," Bristow said.
http://www.wzzm13.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=81842"challenge the university into having them take a stand about … what the difference is between freedom of speech and hate speech, fighting words and violent speech," CLU President Gabriela Alcazar said.
Here’s some speech you may understand better: If you keep promoting your pueblo imperialism, your Aztlan fascism, and your victim-class larceny in such a way that Middle America really hears you, things may take a turn that surprises you. Right now, the situation is merely that every small town from the Hudson River to the San Andreas Fault is agitating to pass its own anti-illegal alien laws, and the squeeze on businesses that use illegals is sending lots of law-breakers home.
But if you maintain the "in-your-face" approach, people will pick up on the fact that you’re aiming at far more than free lunch, and really hope to eradicate freedom in America. Then, in places like Lansing, and even in Ann Arbor, you may find yourself trying to outrun people with far shorter fuses than mine who may be carrying shotguns. A bunch of foreigners trying to shut down Americans’ right to speak up for their own laws—those are fighting words
It is amazing how some people are all in favor of free speech unless it makes them mad. Unless I missed that part of the Constitution I am not aware of a freedom of not being made mad.
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They should be able to talk unless they are saying things like we are going to kill [specific student] because they deserve to die. Then that’s hate speech and that needs to be stopped.
The people who are mad can always talk back if there is nothing they can do about it.
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Burn all books – or at least, those printed in English…. OOPS! Sorry! I should expand that to ALL BOOKS NOT PRINTED IN SPANISH.
Saddest thing, yet, is that most of this insanity is in no way representative of most of Latin America. Just who the H3LL ARE these oddballs procreating like bunnies?
…
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They need to have a lesson on free speech and write on the blackboard 100 times, " I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death your right to say it.
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In the words of the worst President in American History, "Bring it on!"
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Check this out:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4079499593161470737
What would you consider this?
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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5239860208427368019&q=open+borders&hl=en
Its funny how the same people here saying its okay for him to talk were up in arms about the president of Iran talking. Double standards. If you want to let these people talk that are racist and promote hate then don’t fight when the President of Iran is allowed to speak in a US university.
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yes the mexican ever happy students are happy banning free certain speakers.
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I believe that people should be held responsible for what they Say, Free speech in America has ,always had its limits, I would tape the speeches and if they were used to incite hated, I would turn the tapes over to ACLU, MALDEF and file a lawsuit against the University.
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My dad made a very good point and involved in the political arena. He stated the continuous fighting over this immigration situation is going to lead to another civil war. Well, I don’t know about that. But if those damn liberals and organizations like ACLU and the low life Governor of my state (Spitzer) would actually do something about all these illegals and stop welcoming everybody and their mother with open arms maybe we will avoid a serious conflict which is obvious where we are heading.
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Thankfully what you find here are just the opposite sides of the spectrum on the immigration issue. Groups like YAF are simply racists who hide under the guise of patriotism. Their actions draw a reaction, an advocacy group looking to rid their university of hate speech. The Southern Poverty law group has a long history of identifying groups that promote hate, and their condemnation of this group should hold weight with any American looking to promote equality and justice in our country.
It is saddening to see so many people in this forum with so much hate in their voices. You should choose your words more carefully, these students are not a bunch of "foreigners"(people of color) trying to shut down "Americans"(white people) rights. Veiling your personal threats of them having to outrun people with shotguns is vile at best. These are not fighting words, they are expressing an opinion and wishing the university to take a stand on the issue. What you seem to be advocating is their words should be met with violence? Sad isn’t it?
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