Linux VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server)

When it comes to website hosting, you will need to consider the type of hosting that is best for you. This will have direct implication on your website and what you can do with it. Here are just a few options that you have.

Free Hosting

Free hosting is something to consider if you just have a personal website that is not going to generate money. Free hosting is limited and usually means that you have the hosting site as part of your domain name. However, this is a great way to start out your personal site and offer information on a very limited budget.

Simple Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the cheapest option available and is perfect for basic websites. The idea behind shared hosting is that thousands of websites are on one server and they all have the same IP address. This is something to consider if you have a small website but there are some limitations.

The problem is that you only have access to a limited size of the CPU, which will mean that you need to limit your website design. Another problem is that you could be limited to the countries that your website reaches to, due to other websites on that IP address.

Business and E-Commerce Hosting

When it comes to a business website, you will need to opt for something that costs slightly more. Business and e-commerce hosting usually offer dedicated IP addresses, so you are not limited, and there are some that will offer more CPU usage.

E-commerce hosting also makes it possible to add a shopping cart to your website without having to worry about PHP coding. This is something to consider, especially if you have limited coding skills. This also helps to keep the server side programming to a limit so you do not need to worry about your CPU usage.

Dedicated Hosting

This is a popular option for those who want a server all to themselves. This does cost a lot but is worth it if you have a large business website. This is something for large businesses to consider. Dedicated hosting means that you will definitely have a dedicated IP address, so only you can affect your website’s worldwide range.

You will also be able to gain much more for your money, including extra email addresses, more sub-domains and more CPU usage – since you will have a server all to yourself.

In some cases where you already have and existing domain with another hosting company when you make the decision to purchase one of our hosting packages.

The article will explain the procedure for moving this domain over to our hosting package.

Your main concern should be that your website is not down for the 48 hour propagation period.

Your first step is to look at our hosting packages, making sure that the new hosting package of your choice provide you with all the services your previous host did to insure that you don't lose major functionality required for your website to function properly.

1. Do not cancel your old hosting before your data is secured on our servers.
2. Send a request to your old hosting provider to unlock the domain name and send you the EPP/Authorisation Key. You can then supply your representative at Namhost with this EPP/Authorisation Key and we will set the domain transfer in progress.
3. Move your data from your old hosting provider to the you new hosting package at Namhost.

If you require assistance in transferring your data from the old host to our hosting account, contact us for any assistance.

At this point you should have two hosting accounts, one with Namhost and the other with previous provider.

Once you or Namhost have confirmed the data has been transferred, we will commence with changing your domain name details to reflect as required to link to our servers; this is referred to as the propagation period.

During this transition period your website will be bouncing between the two hosts every other minute.

After the 48 hour propagation period, we will confirm that your website has fully moved over to the new hosting account. Once we have confirmed with you, you can proceed to cancel the old hosting account.

If you have any question or require assistance with this process, please don't hesitate to contact us.

As soon as funds reflect in our bank account we mark invoices as PAID. When an invoice is marked as PAID domain names are automatically registered and hosting accounts are automatically set up. As soon as the hosting account is set up the client will receive an email (Subject: New Account Information) containing all the necessary information used to manage the hosting account.

Yes, they can.

Yet it's never a good idea to implement such bandwidth heavy features into your website before consulting with one of our technicians. They should be able to provide you with a methods to reduce your bandwidth cost and/or provide a better alternative.

Choosing the correct hosting package is a very important step in getting your web site online.

If miscalculated, you could end up spending a lot of extra money on hosting that you don't really need. Some basic questions that you need to answer before you pick a hosting package, include:

• How much bandwidth do I truly need?
• How many hits is my site most likely to get?
• Are there ways that I can avoid using too much bandwidth?
• Will I be installing several scripts on my site?
• How many mailboxes must I set up?
• How much space is required for my mailboxes?

Our packages were designed with these questions in mind. We firmly believe that for 95% of our clients the "Lite Package" (our smallest package) should be more than sufficient to effectively run a web site. And the reality is, over the last 3 years we have proved this theory to be spot on.

Currently, 95% of our users are in fact, signed up on the lite package. So, let's see if you form part of this 95% or if your requirements are more.

The Lite Package has the following features:

1. 400 Mb Space
2. 4000 Mb Bandwidth
3. 20 Mailboxes
4. 1 MySQL Database

Web Space:

400 Megabytes really do go a long way nowadays. Most web sites hosted by us rarely use more than 50% of their allotted web space. To get a feel for how much 400 Mb is on the internet, I've listed a few examples of what you can do with 100 Mb...

100 Mb equals approximately:

• 2000 Images, or
• 34000 HTML Pages
• 10 videos

These are just rough estimates, but should give you a fair idea of what can be done with 100 Mb.

Let's say you want to install Joomla, a very advanced Content Management Systems available for free through Fantastico. This will use a total of 12.1 Mb of your total web space. The same goes for most of the scripts available for free through Fantastico.

They rarely take up more than about 10 Mb of space. Basically, unless you are running an intense media site or expect to host several thousands of pictures on your web site, it is extremely unlikely that you will need more than 100Mb web space.

Bandwidth:

Bandwidth is basically how much traffic your web site will allow. Every time someone accesses your site they are actually downloading data from our server (or who ever is hosting the site's server). For example, if you have a picture of 50Kb on the site, your total bandwidth for the month will decrease by 50Kb every time someone accesses that picture.

Clients usually over-estimate bandwidth completely. Any new-comer would like to believe their web site will generate a large amount of traffic. The reality is that very few do at first.

Even those that do generate large numbers of unique hits, rarely require huge amounts of bandwidth. Only in cases where web sites become large multimedia portals, does bandwidth ever really become a problem.

Sites that might require a lot of bandwidth even though few unique hits occur, include:

• Photo gallery sites
• Streaming video / audio sites
• Sites with large archived documents
• Sites with other large downloadable files (zip, exe etc)

To give you an idea of how much 1000 Mb bandwidth is, I'll use an example. A normal HTML web page with some graphics is rarely more than about 100Kb. In fact, 100Kb is a a fairly large web page.

With 1000 Mb bandwidth, this will allow users to access your site 10000 times. This gives you an average of about 333 hits a day. The most successful web site in Namibia that I know of, gets about 200 unique hits a day.

Most sites are lucky to get 10 - 40 unique hits per day. Basically, unless you have a extremely big advertising campaign and expect hundreds (or thousands) of hits, it's unlikely you will be using any more than than 1000Mb of bandwidth.

The average bandwidth on sites hosted by Namhost is 150Mb, not even close to a fifth of the total amount available.

Mailboxes:

The lite package comes with 20 mailboxes. This means you can set up 20 email addresses with SMTP and POP access. You can specify the size of the mailboxes to be anything.

It is even possible to set up 20 mailboxes of 50 megs each. This will of course add up to 1000Mb space, which is well over your 400Mb limit. However, this space only contributes to your limit when it's used. So, only as emails are received, will you start getting closer to your limit.

It is also possible to set up unlimited forwarders. Let's say you have a gmail account, myFakeAddress@gmail.com. It is possible to setup e-mail accounts in cPanel that will forward to this account. And you can set up as many as you want.

Most business set up info@theirdomain.com, sales@theirdomain.com and support@theirdomain.com. It's a lot more professional than having an @mweb.co.za, @gmail or @iway.na account, but makes it easier for you by sending all emails to one central mailbox.

So basically, with the lite package, it's possible to create 20 mailboxes and if that's not enough, you can set up an unlimited amount of forwarders! So again, it's very unlikely that you will need more than 20 mailboxes.

MySQL Databases:

MySQL Databases are primarily used for installing scripts. Although it's possible to install many scripts on one Database, Fantastico requires you to use one Database per script. So, having more than one database is purely a convenience.

Seeing as most web sites just run one CMS (such as Joomla) or one Forum (such as SMF) it's rarely necessary to have more than one DB.

Conclusion:

Unless you are 100% sure that you will be using an enormous amount of traffic, it might be a good idea to start with a small package.

You can always upgrade to a larger package at a later stage, and it definitely might be worth the effort if it means you'll be saving a few bucks.

Moving to a VPS has a lot of benefits and give you a lot more control over your hosing. Below is a list of advantages the VPS provides which your current shared hosting account does not:

1. More disk space.
   - You are on a Premium Shared Hosting package which entitles you to a maximum disk space of 5 GB, whereas our smallest VPS option boasts a disk space allowance of 60 GB
2. Manage multiple hosting accounts on one VPS server.
   - You will have full root access as well as access to WHM (Web Host Manager) on a VPS. These features allow you to create your own hosting packages and hosting accounts. If you already have a range of hosting accounts with Namhost, you will be able to host them all on one VPS package and manage them all at one place. This saves you money, since you will only be paying for the VPS rather than paying for different shared hosting accounts.
3. Set your own emails limit per hour.
   - On a shared hosting server all clients are limited to sending 500 emails per hour. This is a policy put in place by Namhost to ensure a shared hosting account does not send spam from a server where a few clients are hosted on as spamming negatively affects the entire server. With the VPS you have full control over this limit. This is particularly useful if you make use of bulk email marketing or if you need to send bulk mails to a large lists of recipients.
4. Increased Bandwidth.
   - Our Premium Shared Hosting package offers a total of 200 GB of bandwidth, our smallest VPS package starts from 1 TB. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred within a month. Bandwidth is used by people visiting your website, emails being downloaded from the server and any uploads to the server.
5. Dedicated IP for your VPS.
   - Currently your hosting accounts shares an IP with all other accounts hosted on the same server. Once you switch over to a VPS you will have your own IP address and this is very good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
6. Your own private name servers.
   - A domain name uses name servers to “point” traffic to a specific server. Currently your domain name uses Namhost’s name servers. A VPS will allow you to register your own nameservers and Namhost’s nameservers will no longer be shown on your WHOIS information - E.g. http://whois.domaintools.com/namhost.com - By owning your own name servers you will see something like “ns1.yourdomain.com, ns2.yourdomain.com” where name servers are displayed.
7. Free SSL Certificate.
   - An SSL certificate is something that shows visitors that your website is a trusted website. It encrypts your emails and allows you to connect to your VPS securely. Google also prefers websites with valid SSLs installed above those that don’t. We will install a FREE SSL Certificate to the main domain name on any VPS package.
8. Free Migration.
   - Namhost will migrate any accounts hosted with us to a VPS at no charge.

Moving over to a VPS package would be perfect for you and will keep you hosted securely for a long time to come.

Please see our VPS hosting packages with prices and features here.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions/concerns or if anything is unclear, we will be happy to assist you.

Here is a complete list of the software that you can install using cPanel's Quick Install. (Please note: we try to keep this list up to date, but it may differ slightly)