If you deal with blogging and have your own web log with numerous articles and thankful active readers, you are most likely to need a powerful tool that would help you with comments management. Currently the most popular tool of the kind is Disqus and today we are going to talk about it specifically. It’s not new and by now it has gained great popularity. You are most likely to have seen it used at different blogs, including ours, but if you are still hesitant about whether to install it on your own blog or not, let us tell you something, that may help you make up your mind quickly.

Numerous comment options

Blogging wouldn’t have any sense, if the ideas we share didn’t get any reactions. Comments are those reactions and they are very important – they let make friends with the most active readers, build partnership with like-minded professionals, share opinions and search for verity in disputable situations. One of the drawbacks of standard blog commenting tools is accessibility – anytime one wants to leave a comment, they need to provide their name and email. The procedure doesn’t look inconvenient, but it has a rocky bottom – people willingly provide their email addresses, that may be used by a spammer if their database somehow gets compromised.

The Disqus tool offers a lot of options, that are not only convenient but also way more secure. You can leave your comments not only as a guest, but also using your Disqus, Google or Yahoo account. Apart from this, you can use your social media accounts – Twitter and Facebook; OpenID login is available as well. Choosing the preferred way of commenting will make your blog readers become recognizable and let them build their online reputation. This will also help you with news sharing.

Social media aspect

Yes, you heard it – anytime you issue a new post, you have more chances to let it become popular, if you use Disqus. As soon as your blog reader comments on it using Twitter or Facebook with a reaction, their comments are placed under their accounts on the correspondent social network. If your post is interesting and catchy enough, it may get hundreds of views overnight thank to prompt spreading. Apart from that you can make new acquaintances faster – once you have a small conversation in your comment section on your blog, you may bring it at once to Twitter or Facebook. On the one hand it will let you keep your comments clean, while on the other hand you will be able to build partner or friendly relationships faster and easier.

Fighting spam

We have already mentioned spam as one of the problems connected with blogging. Many spammers use blog comments to leave spamvertized messages so it sometimes becomes hard to monitor blog comment sections. Even anti-spam tools, that really are very helpful, cannot cover all comments. And if your blog is rather popular and the spammers leave messages that pass all checks – finding non-spam comments may be hard.

Using Disqus makes things easier – since it disables native comments tool after the installation, all human comments arrive to Disqus, thus all the comments that you’ll keep receiving under the native comment section in your blog admin panel will be spamvertized and you can remove all of them without hesitations. As for spam in Disqus – their servers have a great database that is constantly updated and maintained, additionally you will be able to use administration dashboard to set your own comment policy.

If you want your blog to become more popular and live, you should look into installing Disqus comments tool on it. With its help you will be able to optimize the work of your blog and resolve a great deal of issues, connected with commenting – easier accessibility and high spam-protection will let both you and your thankful readers enjoy your blog and use it more actively.

Recently one of our readers asked us to post an article about the benefits of Windows driven VPS hosting. Since we’ve been looking into provision of this service as well, there was some interesting information gathered and we would like to share this with you. We thought that showing both upsides and downsides of this type of hosting is more fair. Sure, this article is posted from our point of view, so it reviews peculiarities of Windows hosting in terms of use of VPS-hosting specifically as a platform.

How is Windows run on VPS servers?

Running Windows on VPS usually implies the use of two types of virtualization technologies – XEN – the technology, generally applied in creation of fully virtualized VPS platforms and Hyper-V – special virtualization system, developed by Microsoft to run Windows VPS server only. XEN is known to many of our readers – this virtualization technology allows to create and manage virtual servers keeping them completely isolated from each other, while using same hardware resources by different system kernels – each fully virtualized environment keeps the system with its kernel that addresses to the layer of virtualized hardware.

As for Hyper-V – this technology needs some description. In fact, it is a hypervisor that works on the basis of partitioning with at least one parent partition that has access to hardware and can create child partitions that host guest OSs within virtual environment – just like XEN and its interfaces. But if you take a closer look, you can see that Hyper-V is a version of core installation of Windows Server 2008 with virtualization support – which makes it look much like OpenVZ that utilizes modified Linux kernel. Thus, it is fair to call it a symbiosis of two technologies.

What is so special about Windows VPS Hosting?

VPS as a platform to run Windows on has become a real discovery for many users who needed Windows-based hosting but could hardly afford a dedicated server while experiencing issues with shared hosting, run under this OS. Indeed, using Windows as a server OS and namely for hosting needs is quite troublesome – initial resource usage is higher than that under Linux, disk usage policy and work of the disk subsystem is more complex, and full functional access can be achieved only by establishment of remote desktop connection (RDP) or a control panel. The latter aspect caused the biggest inconvenience, since shared hosting users are not usually provided with RDP access while the control panel functionality is limited so, that the lack of privileges makes the use of many tools impossible.

Use of VPS hosting has solved many of those problems – VPS carriers with large amounts of RAM allowed to delegate resources that are enough for the system to operate with additional software and cover the loads created by resource intensive programs (e.g. Microsoft Exchange server); RAID hard disk arrays + virtual disk partitioning allowed to minimize the I/O loads and increase the read/writing speed. Finally, a VPS allowed to create isolated environment, which enabled the users to manage their servers under “Administrator” privileges.

What are the downsides to keep in mind?

Besides the obvious upsides of Windows-based VPS hosting, there are, however, downsides that should be considered while making the choice. First of all the price – when it comes to evaluation of Windows hosting in general and its hosting on a standalone server in particular, all licenses, starting from the OS itself and all software, seem to cost an arm and a leg. The server is not going to be cheap as well – as mentioned above, Windows requires more resources, so the least powerful virtual server you will need is a XEN-based VPS – which are more expensive than those under OpenVZ – with 1 GB of RAM at minimum (you can find plans with 512 MB of RAM offered, but there won’t be much resources left to operate with). A Hyper-V based server with same resource rates will grant you more stable hosting, but it is going to cost more.

Mentioning this downside we don’t mean that the pricing difference is going to reflect in tens of dollars compared to Linux VPS hosting, but this may make some users think, whether they need it – at least those, who are not sure, if they are going to prefer ASP and .NET to PHP. If you are sure about the use of Microsoft software, here are some more tips on what you should be careful about.

Accessibility. You may be happy about having RDP and control panel access to your server – both provide clear intuitive interfaces, the former actually makes you feel like sitting at your home desktop, but are those means actually enough? If your server gets too overloaded, you may not be able to access it to reboot it, so you will need to send a support request which definitely causes a time loss. What you may make sure about before choosing your Windows-driven VPS host, is if they offer remote reboots from the host’s client panel – this may save your time.

Monitoring. Unlike Linux-based VPS servers, those running Windows need more severe monitoring, which may result into either bigger expenses – so you will need to hire an administrator or involve your host’s support team – or stresses, caused by constant inspection of your server’s state and investigation of issues it has or may have in future.

There are even more aspects, related to OS Windows itself to be kept in mind – security, as Windows is quite vulnerable; software-related; usability-related and others. So it is fair to get back to the question, whether you really need it. Many webmasters who are asked to create a site to work on a Windows server usually ask this question. And when they receive a solid “yes” they want the project to be described as clearly as possible. Thus, if you imagine your project well and see the full picture of how it is going to be run and why exactly it needs Windows, you are on the right way, and we hope, that your experience in this is going to be positive.

Yesterday was another day the unavailability of Skype brought great disservice. Although this fail was not global, it did affect many users including those who run business over Internet or use the Web as a powerful secondary channel with Skype serving for business communication. Support calls and chat sessions, on-line meetings – all types of conversations, run over Skype dropped dead having if not paralyzed then significantly disrupted the activity of hosting providers, e-shops, on-line consulting agencies and many more businesses. It’s not know for sure why this outage took place, but that is not something we are going to discuss today.

Today we will tell you how to take serious preventive measures to avoid such issues in future. In fact it is not recommended to use Skype or similar services as a primary channel for business communication, no matter if this communication is within the organization or between the company personnel and their customers, but if you do, you should definitely back them up.

Backing up Communication Channel Within the Organization

To sound the most helpful and to cover as many aspects as possible we decided to split our tips into ones for issues with communication within the company and into those that affect communication between staff and customers. Let us start from company internal issues since those are kind of easier to be resolved, at least in terms of organization of the backup channel, since the ways to do that may be quite difficult.

Instant Messengers

Facebook chat and Google Talk have pushed traditional instant messengers out, but the protocols are still working and worth being used. Yes sir, dig out your good old AIM or ICQ accounts’ credentials, fire up your clients and bring the conversation there. An interesting thing about those is that you can easily move all your business contacts to a separate list that is going to make the communication easier. Moreover, some of the latest ICQ clients support audio and video conversations, too.

Local Chat Platform

If you limit communication within your company to instant messaging on the one hand and want to make it secure on the other hand, there’s nothing better than setup a Jabber (XMPP protocol based) server and get some Jabber-complient client to keep all your internal business discussions within it. A well-organized server will let you communicate with your partners and gather them in conference rooms world wide, regardless of their location. And if some serious security is required, you may limit your Jabber server accessibility so that your partners could connect to it over VPN.

Local VoIP Platform

If live audio conversations are vital, you can either setup a server that would support voice over IP technology or signup for some VoIP service. Both variants imply the possibility to make calls over Internet using special software installed on local machines that are connected with the VoIP server. Organizing such a channel for communication within the organization is going to be rather cheap since you and your partners will only use extensions, which does not expect any cell or land phone calls being made. Other solutions will require more expenses which nevertheless stay worthwhile.

Backing up Communication Channel Between Personnel and Customers

Instant Messengers

Those can be used as a backup solution for communications between staff and your customers, too. There are, however, aspects that should be kept in mind while moving your support chat to AIM or any other service. First things first, using public messengers for communication with your customers does not look quite professional – so while switching to those channels, even temporarily you need to create a special user login, which name would somehow be connected with your company and your business. Another thing to check is your customers’ tastes – some may use MSN, some prefer AOL, some chat via ICQ. Finally, you will need to be able to update your clients on that rather quickly – using your corporate blog, forum, Twitter account or Facebook or even main website page will be fine to provide those backup account names.

On-site chat system

This is something that should actually be a primary channel and of course you will be hardly able to install it as a backup channel once your experience a crash, but if you have a chat system but prefer using Skype instead, it is high time to refer your clients there. It may also be worthwhile to reconsider the system in use so that it wouldn’t make you to switch to Skype at least for instant messaging – currently many chat systems have convenient interface and support numerous features – chat-to-email delivery, operator or service rating and many more.

VoIP Platform

Unlike Jabber that is mostly used only locally, VoIP platform can be used as a communication channel for both staff and customers. This channel however, will require more expenses than an “internal” one since you will need to have a land line phone number bound to your VoIP server. Thus, accepting call withing roaming and from cell-phones may affect your balance. On the other hand, if it is a backup solution and the issue is not to last long – you can sacrifice your funds for maximum uptime of your service.

As far as you can see, there are many other ways to build a reliable on-line communication channel for your business. Some of them may not be free but the money you will spend on those will provide your with great reliability and good quality of connectivity. In this article we do not deface Skype, of course – we just issue a friendly reminder for everyone, who use public communication services for business activity since those may fail and damage your business easily.

There are some facts that you know that might help you there. For instance, we know that the server in its basic installation – usually LAMP – requires at least 128 MB of RAM. Choice of the control panel will make you add another 64 MB to your requirements (if your choose WebMin or DirectAdmin) or even 128 MB – if you want to run cPanel. This makes a minimum of 256 MB with a lack of operating options. What you can run there is email and FTP exchange (not intensive though) and hosting of simple websites. Dynamic and script-driven websites, such as CMS will also fit this configuration but you may need to implement many adjustments, some of which can limit the functionality of your online project.

If you look into running something more serious on the Web, you will need to search for a more solid solution. Let us review bigger VPS configurations and estimate what can be hosted there.

512 MB

This is one of the most popular configurations available on the market of VPS hosting. A VPS with 512 MB of RAM usually becomes a step-up for users who have never dealt with VPS servers before and who gave this type service a try on a smaller plan and then requested an upgrade.

If you want to host E-commerce software or run a script that is going to use your server resources constantly – a VPS with 512 MB of RAM is going to suit you perfectly. This plan will also fit those, who look into using a VPS as a platform for hosting reselling – simple shared hosting, of course. WordPress and Magento users will also find such a VPS a better luck, since 256 MB virtual machines never let them run those CMS full-throttle.

1024 MB

A one-Gig VPS is a choice of a Pro. Many gurus and experienced webmasters, as well as resellers and other online business holders, either purchase those servers at once or upgrade to them shortly.

If you deal with hosting reselling, you will find a VPS with 1024 MB RAM to be a perfect solution for serious reseller business. Unlike smaller VPS plans, those and higher let you offer the so-called Master reseller hosting which implies that your resellers will be able to sell hosting, too. And of course, a more powerful VPS will let you manage the clients easier. Indeed, if you have a thousand clients or more, whatever the business you do is, why should you partition them into groups to send emails hourly so as not to overload the server. You deal with e-commerce, so you must have some special offers and discounts and you want to be sure, everyone knows it – a powerful VPS will let you notify everyone at once without overloads or any other issues.

2048 MB

If you need a power of a dedicated server, but do not want to pay extra for the features you do not need, a 2 GB VPS is something you will like.

Those servers are usually the top ones among many VPS hosting providers and thus have the highest privileges on the carrier. This feature will make you feel absolutely comfortably on your VPS and it is worth it. Such a powerful VPS is heaven for big online projects and geeky things – those servers are capable of letting you refuse from standard server configuration, so one can easily install there such popular software as Java, Tomcat webserver, FFMPEG and many other tools, to make their online project a hi-tech multimedia pad.

We hope that this review of the most popular VPS plans helped you find out what you need or may need for your online business. If it did, you may like the news that since recently we run a special offer that has doubled RAM on all our VPS servers, so now our 256 MB, 512 MB and 1024 MB plans come with 512, 1024 and 2048 Megabytes of RAM accordingly.

Hosting

That’s where it all begins – the first mistake many e-commerce owners make is they get expensive hosting on a powerful server while having just a small website. What happens is they waste their money on hosting, which power they don’t exactly use full-throttle. This is something incorrect that needs to be looked after – if you are only launching your project, it is worthwhile to take a simple budget plan that will be enough for your needs while your business is being developed. Hosting providers are loyal about upgrades, so you are not going to have any troubles when you need to change your environment to something bigger and more powerful – you may even get a discount, so you can expect much money to be saved while acting that far-sighted.

Domain

Domain cost cutting usually comes down to getting a free domain along with your hosting account. That looks and sounds nice, but they usually offer only one domain – what if you need more? Well, you may need more since you may want to run your corporate blog or newsfeed or whatsoever under a separate domain, not a subdomain. You may also need to have some similar names “reserved”, so anytime a websurfer makes a typo, he or she gets to your and your website only. Finally, you may simply have several projects to run, so regardless of the purpose of multiple domains registration, you need to get them with as much profit as possible – therefore you need to find a registrar that offers discounts even on small batches of domains. Checking the latest deals, that registrars constantly offer may help you a lot with that, especially if you not only check their main website but media resources – blogs, Twitter and Facebook profiles, etc. – as well.

Advertising and promotion

That’s the very point you have a great deal of options at. To put it simple – the more manual work you do in advertising, the more money you save on it. What you can choose among is: guest blogging, link exchange, review posting, social media activity, affiliation and PPC. Of course, we can hardly tell you about each of those activities in many details, but a short review we are going to give you should help you with making your choice.

Guest blogging. This type of self-promotion will be useful if you offer some services. You will need to find a relevant guest blog, usually in business or in certain niche you particularly deal with and place an interesting eye-catching article that is going to represent you as a pro and show that your project is the one to trust. Since the idea of guest blogging is noncommercial self-promotion, your article should not look spamvertized, additionally, they may limit you in backlinking (usually 2 links are allowed), so you need to think carefully what those are going to be. If you have a blog, it’s advisable to put the first link there but not to your website directly.

Link exchange. This is another free way of advertising. Although it has lost its popularity lately, you can still gain something on it, but what you need to make sure about, is that the resource you are going to exchange links with is as relevant is possible, otherwise you may have issues with SEO that is going to harm your search engine visibility.

Review posting. This activity is kind of close to posting at guest blogs, but it allows your message to look more advertising. Review placement makes sense for many online businesses – what you need to do is find the directory that would match the niche of your business and leave a review about your company or about some of its services or products specifically. You can also search for websites that create listing of companies of a certain category. Reviews on such sites are usually left by prospect or existing customers, so adding your company information there will do you good, too. There is, however, something to look after –review posting and company listing can be both free and paid, so it’s always advisable to learn the website policy first.

Social media activity. This way of self-promotion can also be free or paid – depending on your goals. Usually you start with creation of a business profile on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and probably some other resources which is free. And then everything depends on your strategy – you may either pick your target audience manually by communicating with people and sharing interesting useful things, or simply grab and take them to your page using targeted ads.

Affiliation. This advertising activity is definitely costly, but what is good about it is that you define the cost on your own. If your business is about selling goods or bringing customers to use some of your services, you may look for some helpers among your most active clients. Of course, helpers need to be rewarded for what they do, so you need to work out an affiliate program that is going to deliver affiliate commissions for sales your partners make. If based on a percentage rate, your affiliate program is not going to take that much.

PPC. Finally we have come to the most popular and effective advertising activity – PPC marketing. This means involvement of such search engines as Google and Yahoo!. Talking about Google and namely its AdWords – one of the most powerful advertising tools so far we can’t hide the fact that it can’t be cheap. But if you setup your campaign effectively, your Return On Investment (ROI) is going to make you happy. Additionally, getting back to the topic of hosting we can give you a tip, that some hosting providers offer Adwords credits along with their hosting accounts. Apart from that, Google issues Adwords coupons so you may have some free credits on those, too.

Summary.

If you look into starting your own e-commerce project, you need to work out a business plan that is going to show you all the expenses you expect to have. If you are lucky and conscious enough, believe us those are going to be covered soon and effectively. If you don’t know where to start at – have a look at the E-commerce hosting plan we offer and Sitevalley.com. Give it a try with 30-days money back period and make sure you are on your way to success.

We all know many bloggers are open minded people who do blogging for fun. They run their web logs for their friends, relatives and like-minded people who they hang around the Web with, so they don’t usually look into making money on their websites. Well, if you are a pro blogger or your blog is simply that popular that you can’t lose your chance to earn something on it, you need to think of how to monetize its traffic.

If your blog is not a community supporting news feed or an add-on page for some website, but a sole project, there are not that many ways to earn on it, but choosing one of those, that we are going to introduce is definitely worth trying.

1. Become an affiliate

One of the easiest ways to start earning money on your web log is enroll into affiliate partnership with some company. The more relevant you partner is to the topics you cover, the more sales you are expected to get. For instance, if you are a photographer and deal with e-shops where you get your equipment, you can place their banner on your blog so any sale made by your visitors from your website will be rewarded with a commission.

The most interesting thing about affiliate partnership is that in fact you don’t need to be bound with one company specifically – you can cooperate with as many of them as you like. And of course, the topics you write about play a very important role. The more niches your blog covers the more different companies you can advertise, and the hosting provider, too, by the way, since you host your blog somewhere, don’t you? Who says your readers don’t want to run their own sites as smoothly as yours. And if you do not want to deal with specific companies and participate in various affiliate programs making new deals anytime you or they need to change something – you can join an affiliate network, like the one held by Commission Junction. Cooperating with them will let you find best affiliate offers and help you with marketplace picking.

2. Offer advertising positions

If your affiliate earnings are going to depend on the visitors’ interest and your partner’s reputation, selling advertising positions will guarantee you constant stable profit. The profit, however, may be questionable and so may be the interest in occupying those positions. Your blog has got to be very popular and have a great number of daily hits to be worth placing one’s advertisement at.

To look and sound more serious and attractive it is advisable to have your blog prepared for expected adverts – work out the positions you are going to leave for them, create kind of a media plan to estimate pricing for those positions depending on the size and period of an ad, gather some traffic information about your resource – number of daily/monthly hits, incoming traffic sources, conversion rates (if any are available by that time). Finally you may look for companies that don’t run affiliate programs but nevertheless may be interested in partnership – even if that doesn’t multiply your funds, you may still expect some bonuses. To find potential advertisers, you may check the relevant keywords on Google – find the keywords that make your blog get displayed on top of search results and check the resources that prompt in Google Adwords – this is going to be a perfect match for your blog. Then you may study the resources you like best and contact their holders personally.

3. Place sponsored reviews

Sponsored reviews is something that is not usually considered as fair advertising. Those e-commerce owners who are not much concerned about acting fair prefer this way of advertising. On the other hand, those bloggers who honor fair-play never accept sponsored reviews placement proposals, although these are well-paid. Well, if you want to earn on this and keep your honor, you may offer placement of such reviews on your own, picking those service or goods providers, you would recommend your readers in fact. If you don’t know how they do it, you can take a look at some of those resources that deal with sponsored reviews placement – http://linkfromblog.com/, http://bloganything.net, http://www.solidblogger.com.

As far as you can see, even doing blogging just for fun may bring some profit. The tips above will hardly make you rich overnight, but will for sure help you cover the cost of your hosting and some other minor spendings. In order to start earning by any of those means you need to make sure your blog is interesting and the contacts you are trying to partner with are relevant. Of course, this will also require good communication skills, but this is something, bloggers don’t usually miss, so good luck By the way, if you are looking for an affiliate partner, already – spend another minute to check out our Affiliate Program at SiteValley.com.

How much RAM do you get in fact?

When you see a 1 GB VPS plan at a very low cost, don’t be too fast in making optimistic conclusions. Check if this entire amount is guaranteed RAM. The best option is to contact sales support – then you are going to have a proof – a copy of your chat or email. But if you don’t have time for those checks, there is a quick way to find it out on your own – check the virtualization type used by this host. If it is XEN – be sure the entire 1 GB of RAM is guaranteed. If they use OpenVZ (the hosts that use it often say their VPSes are powered by Virtuozzo), there’s a risk, that their pricing provides the combined amount of RAM – guaranteed + burstable (RAM, that may be allocated only for a short period of time and thus – not constantly available). Since RAM is the main feature of any VPS server, this should one of the first points you verify before moving any further.

CPU units

Checking out pricing of some VPS hosts, one can find such feature as CPU units. This parameter shows the CPU frequency, available for the given VPS. Although it looks rather informative and lets the potential client compare the offered plans in more details, it’s not quite a correct way to represent VPS CPU specifications. To find out how powerful the CPU of the given VPS is, you need to know, what number of cores the entire VPS-carrier has, what their frequency is and how much of this power is delegated to the specific virtual machine – the latter factor depends on performance priority.

If you don’t know, how to interpret this information, you can simply ignore it. If you do need the details, you can have a brief consultation with the sales department of your potential host. This will let you find out the specifications of the carrier. The more powerful it is and the bigger the plan you are looking into, the more powerful your VPS is going to be.

Disk Space

Since VPS servers are usually offered as a fast solution that is cheaper than a dedicated server, those are not designed for large data processing. The minimal plan at some VPS hosts may offer as little as 10 GB of disk space. If you are going to host a few web pages, it’s alright, but if you work with email and databases, you need to consider disk space allocation rather carefully. Now let us count what you have in the end – after your server is setup, the system may take up to 2 GB of disk space. Any backup you make is going to create a file of the size approximately equal to the size of your /home directory. Not that much space left, isn’t it? That is why another Gigabyte of your virtual HDD may become vital. Well, it can also be taken by swap. According to the architecture of OS Linux, swap is a fixed disk partition, not a file, unlike on Windows – therefore, before you order a XEN-based VPS, you need to consult sales department first, to find out whether /swap is counted with the disk space offered or not.

Summary

If you want to be completely sure about your future VPS host, you need to find out as many details as you can before you actually sign-up for their services. Your potential host may not list everything on their web-page, it’s alright, but their sales and technical team should always be able to explain these or those aspects of hosting with their company. If it happens that some of your questions remains unanswered, you have serious reasons to not consider this host. If you are looking for an affordable and reliable VPS host right now, please spend another minute checking out our plans here at SiteValley.com.

Yesterday we at SiteValley.com started a promo – from now on you can get a virtual private server from us with a doubled amount of RAM paying the same price. This is a limited time offer, although the final date of the promo is not yet defined we started receiving many sign-up requests. Since the promo is also valid for our current customers, incoming upgrade requests arrive as well.

Why?

One may wonder why we increased exactly RAM. We might lower the prices, increase disk space or bandwidth quotas or include some special service to the plan cost. However we did not, since the main idea of that promo is to fulfill the need of our current and prospect clients – the need of performance.

We released a plenty of articles regarding VPS hosting peculiarities lately and despite that almost all factors become the key ones when you search for a virtual private server, there’s one parameter you look at firstly – amount of RAM. RAM really is important for the VPS user, since if the client needs more disk space or less traffic limits, he or she gets a physical server, but if they are here for a VPS, they check the RAM quota in the first place. Right now, when software requirements increase and the amount of day-to-day tasks grows – it’s rather hard to manage all that having a server with amount or RAM that used to be popular among home PC users over ten years ago. Right now the minimal RAM quota at SiteValley.com is 512MB and we believe many of our customers are going to like it.

What Does it Mean for Me?

If you are still in doubts, let us show you some examples of how useful those changes are and how exactly they are going to do you good.

First thing first – the control panel – that’s something many people have problems with. Experiencing lack of RAM they either have to get an inconvenient panel of DirectAdmin type to have more free RAM left or get a full-functioning entirely automated solution, like cPanel that makes them forget about some manual works on the server… and that makes the server forget about being fast and responsive. Well, right now even our minor plans – oVPS1/xVPS1 – will let you have your VPS with cPanel setup on it.

Tasks processing and scheduling. If you wait for non-business time to backup your content or to execute some mass mail delivery so as not to experience slowdowns or glitches – your VPS lacks RAM. There’s not much to do about it since you can kill or suspend primary processes. Thus you have to figure out schedules and do some work within inconvenient narrow time frames wishing your VPS had more RAM. Now it has, so you may not be that strict about memory allocation and load distribution.

Overall performance. Whenever your VPS uses up all RAM, it never goes down at once. Our OpenVZ customers are happy with burstable RAM they can use to cover minor load spikes, while XEN users rely on swap that uses hard disk to temporarily store background processes, saving RAM and reallocating it for new processes. It’s fine and such overuse is bearable, but it causes slowdowns and if you work with databases or dynamic content – you may start receiving timeouts, so your site turns unreachable with your server being online. Well, for now your server will have some more RAM to use up till it starts using swap or eating some spare memory of the carrier.

We hope that our article helped you understand why we took care of RAM being increased specifically and what changes it is going to bring in. If you want to get a VPS from SiteValley.com but feel somehow unsure about the plan and virtualization type – feel free to contact our live chat support or submit a ticket to our sales department. And of course, you can browse our blog for more VPS-specific articles.

To help you in your VPS quest, we have compiled a simple guide to help take some of the complications out of searching and selecting a VPS provider.

What Is a VPS Server

Firstly, in case you are still not 100% clear what exactly a VPS is, here is a simplified definition:

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. A physical server is virtually segmented into smaller servers. Each VPS is allocated a certain share of the overall resources of the physical server it resides on. With the exception of the CPU, the resources allocated to each VPS are dedicated and private. They cannot be used by other VPS accounts on the same server.

Moving to VPS from Shared Hosting

You may have been using shared hosting and decided to move to a VPS. So what extra resources and features will a VPS provide?

Dedicated Resources
A VPS account comes with dedicated resources. Unlike shared hosting, you will be allocated a dedicated amount of RAM and disk space, often referred to as guaranteed resources. The RAM is the important issue. Even the disk space allocated by a basic VPS package will normally be sufficient. A low RAM allocation, however, makes some basic VPS packages a no-go right from the start.

The smallest allocation of RAM being offered with VPSs is 128Mb. This is a fairly meagre amount and you should be looking for at least 256Mb to begin with. Most websites now use some form of database and graphical content that relies on RAM to function efficiently. Unless you are running the most basic of websites you need to be asking for 256Mb at the very least.

Some VPS providers will offer a ‘burstable’ RAM feature. This allows you to exceed your RAM allowance if necessary (a sudden traffic surge for example). This is not a guaranteed resource and a hosting company will ask you to upgrade if your website constantly abuses the feature and regularly exceeds its allotted RAM allocation. But burstable RAM provides a welcome safety net for those unforeseen situations.

Increased Flexibility, Customization, and Security
Your VPS package will offer some immediate advantages in terms of control and overall personalization. You will be able to install your own programs, scripts, and applications…or have the hosting provider do that for you. The level of actual involvement you have in this depends on whether you opt for a managed or unmanaged VPS account. Both these options will be discussed in a moment.

Apart from CPU power, a VPS account does not share resources. This provides a more stable and secure environment. No other user accounts, located on the same server, can access your disk space or RAM. For this reason alone, VPS is a lot more secure than shared hosting.

As mentioned, you have the option to choose a managed or unmanaged VPS account. Here is a little insight into both variations:

Managed and Unmanaged VPS

Managed
If you are moving directly from shared hosting and have limited technical expertise (in term of web hosting, server functions, and program installation) you may want to opt for a Managed account.

With a managed account, your web host will assist with a variety of technical assistance. The most common service is to help with the installation of programs and applications, and provide assistance with transferring databases and important website files. More often than not, a good provider will offer a selection of useful programs for you to choose from. They will then install any that you select.

A Managed VPS account allows you the freedom to not become distracted with more evolved technical issues, while remaining control over what software is installed on your account. The downside is you will be reliant on your web host to provide adequate software, and trust them to install and manage it correctly.

Unmanaged
You will probably have worked out that an Unmanaged VPS account means no interference from a web host. You will be able to choose your own software and install it yourself. This is the option for the technically savvy control freak. The web host will still be responsible for maintaining the server and performing system upgrades, but otherwise, you will be left to your own devices.

VPS Issues: Overselling and CPU Drain

Your VPS will reside on a physical server alongside other accounts. While your VPS does have dedicated RAM and disk space, it still shares the physical server’s CPU with all the other accounts. This is hardly ever a concern and will rarely affect performance, but there is a chance that a less reputable web host will host too many VPS accounts on one server.

This is referred to as ‘overselling’. Too many accounts on one server can add a severe constraint to the CPU performance each account receives. This could also occur when too many resource-hungry accounts are place on the same physical server.

If you opt for a low RAM VPS package and/or end up with a host that oversells, you will wish you had stuck with shared hosting.

Demand the Best VPS Deal: Tell the Web Host What YOU Want!

You will probably find many basic VPS packages are cheap because the offer a tiny RAM allowance. These are not really any better than a good shared hosting package. The next problem is when you choose the next option to get the additional RAM you require and find it also has way too much disk space. You don’t want to pay for something you will probably never use.

The answer is to be pushy. Contact the web host and tell them that you are looking for more RAM, not RAM and disk space, and you are not willing to pay for something you do not need. Ask them if they can offer you additional RAM with the same basic disk space allowance and tell the host you only want to pay for additional RAM.

There are many reputable web hosts competing in a very fierce market. Don’t be afraid to tell them what you want, and remember the famous line, ‘the customer is always right!’ One of the hosts to look at is SiteValley.com – check out the plans, they offer, their virtual servers are setup with great care and their support is friendly and confident.

This guest post is written by Roko Nastic, editor at WebmasterFormat.com. He likes helping people choose a web host for general or more specific purposes like choosing hosting for DotNetNuke website.

Getting Recognized

One of the major ideas we kept while working on redesign was brand awareness. Meeting readers who didn’t know that we offer web hosting services and communicating with clients, who never guessed SiteValley runs its own blog, we decided to make our blog look more close to our business – now we’ve got design that makes us recognizable and the navigation block to make the search around our main web-site easier.

This is, however, not just it. We decided to thank our readers and created a 20% discount for those our visitors, who like blogging and looking for a reliable hosting solution. If you are eager to run your own blog and don’t know what to start with – visit our Blog Hosting page and signup with coupon “svblog” to enjoy the instant 20% off your hosting bill.

Becoming Social

Improved Twitter activity, new Facebook fans – why not share our success with you? Share your news and success stories, too. Share, discuss and involve even more people spreading your word across the web.

We are also open for discussions on our blog content and organization – just share your opinion in the survey box, delivered by a great widget by KissInsights and we will consider your suggestions. We do value our readers’ opinions so please spend a couple of seconds after reading this article to leave it. Of course, we are going to change the survey questions from time to time to get the clearer picture of what you think of us so please stay in touch.

More Dialogue

The latest research we ran and those hours of moderation spent monthly on traditional Word-Press comments made us switch to an awesome commenting tool called Disqus that is going to be used at our blog for now. Now you don’t need to register or leave your full name and email – just login with your Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo or OpenID and share your thoughts.

Apart from commenting simplicity you will also feel how easy it became to communicate with other commentators and attract people from other resources to take part in discussion. For instance, having logged in with your Twitter account you can easily make your comment a Twitter mention.

Topics and Categories

Those are going to be expanded, too. Our former articles on blogging prompted an idea to create a special category of Blogging Tips where we are going to deliver more details on how to make you blog look and run better. Apart from those, more articles on software and web-technologies are expected. Again, you will be able to share your ideas on what and in which niche should be published.

Additionally, we decided to make some room for guest posts. We are going to accept those monthly within the framework of a “Special Guest” rubric. Since SVHostingBlog is still a corporate blog, we are not going to publish many of them – mostly useful and interesting posts by great webmasters, Internet marketers and so on.

Before You Close the Tab

Thank you for being with us, no matter if you just joined us or have already been a dedicated reader for months. We hope you like what we are doing there and that our articles are useful for you and your business. If you have any questions or want to share something right ahead – feel free to leave your comment below – we will get back with you as soon as possible.