It has become fairly easy to find great cheap hosting deals for shared hosting as well as for VPS hosting.

However, these cheap prices don't always stay cheap forever!

Unfortunately, as many of our users alerted us, we found out that it has become an industry standard for hosting companies to lure new customers in with cheap sticker prices only to abruptly increase the monthly price at the end of the first payment term. For example, you may sign up at $1.99 / mo for the first 2 years but as your plan auto-renews at the end of those 2 years, your price may go up to $5.95/month.

Many customers don't realize this until it is too late and they have already been billed for a full year renewal at the increased price. Don't be one of them!

How to be a smart shopper

Solution 1: Be prepared to change hosts frequently

When you sign up for a cheap web-hosting plan, you will be able to lock in the low price for 12, 24, 36 or even 48 months if you pay in advance for the whole period. But as renewal time comes up, you will have to pay the higher rate... or switch to another webhost... and that is what most smart shoppers actually do! This is very similar to switching cell-phone plans to always take advantage of the best deals.

There are a few things you can do to be fully prepared for this:

1. Make a note in your calendar in order to be reminded automatically 1 month before the end of your initial term that you should start looking for another host.
2. Make sure to cancel your account in due time according to the terms & conditions of your web host. You may also remove your credit card information from your old host a couple of weeks before the end of the term to avoid being charged without your knowledge.
3. If possible, use a separate provider to register your domain name. This makes switching to another host much easier than if your domain name is sort of "held hostage" at your old hosting company.

Solution 2: Choose a web-host which rewards loyalty

At the time of this writing HostMetro is the only hosting company to offer a "Price Lock Guarantee". This means that at renewal, you will get the same price as when you first signed up.

However, some other hosts also have renewal rates which are close to, or even identical to the initial sticker price, they just don't guarantee it will never evolve over time. This also means the price may actually go down by the time of renewal.

Best strategy

1. Go with a host which offers a reasonable renewal rate
2. Have a reminder in your calendar to check that everything is ok 1 month before the end of your term. If not, be prepared to switch to another host.
3. Rinse and repeat.

So what exactly is the difference between a Cloud Hosting plan and a Virtual Private Server (VPS) ?

It's a bit tricky because the term "cloud" has been widely over-used, misused and abused by many... However, all serious web-hosting providers will consider the difference like this:

VPS Hosting

A VPS is a virtual machine running on a single dedicated server. That server is shared between a number of VPS virtual machines. It means that a part of the CPU time, a part of the RAM and a part of the disk space are allocated to your VPS. If the server is shut down, all the VPS virtual machines on that server go offline.

Cloud Hosting

With Cloud Hosting, you also have a virtual machine, but it is NOT hosted on a specific single dedicated server. On the contrary, your virtual machine can be spun up on any dedicated server of the hosting company's infrastructure, depending on availability. In case a server goes down, all the virtual machines it was running can be spun up again very quickly on a different server. The disk space may be network storage or it may be replicated to local SSDs when the virtual machine is spun up on a new server.

One particularity of this is that if you need several identical servers with load-balancing in order to handle traffic surges, Cloud hosting can quickly (sometimes almost instantly) spin up extra instances of your servers, as many as you need and as long as you need, then spin them down again when they are no longer used. You generally get billed by the hour for each running instance and you have access to an API for managing your instances.

How do they compare?

Technically, a VPS infrastructure is simpler and easier to set up than a Cloud infrastructure. Therefore VPS hosting will typically be cheaper than Cloud hosting.

However with VPS hosting you may run into limits that will make you prefer Cloud hosting:

• With VPS you can grow the specs of your virtual machine, as long as there is space on your sever (depending on other clients). After this, tech support will need to move your virtual machine to another server with more available resources. This may take days or weeks. Sometimes it's not possible at all. With Cloud the same operation will only take minutes or maybe even seconds, because the infrastructure is built for automatically moving VMs from server to server.
• With VPS, if there is a hardware issue with your server, you get downtime while the server gets serviced. With Cloud, if there is a hardware issue, you get moved to another server and you barely notice the downtime.
• Cloud allows you (via an API) to scale up and down the number of virtual machines you may be running simultaneously. VPS is a reserved slot on a server, with no easy up and down scaling.
• Cloud hosting also typically comes with infrastructure management. This means that all your cloud instances can communicate on a private network that is automatically configured. This is useful for separating your application server from your database server, for database replication, for placing a load balancer in front of your application servers, etc.

Conclusion

• VPS is best suited for small sites that need flexibility (root access) but can run on a single (virtual) machine and/or need to contain their hosting costs.
• Cloud is best suited for sites that rely on a multi-(virtual)-machine infrastructure, typically with load balancing and potentially up/down scaling depending on traffic surges.

The problem

Many of us have registered domain names at Moniker.com. And while they are both effective and efficient at registering and managing your domain names for a low "bulk" price, their DNS servers have proven to be utterly unreliable with several day long outtages over the last year.

This means your domains are all good and safe but if you use Moniker's own DNS servers (instead of, for example, your web hosting company's name servers), people may experience additional delay in trying to access your site or they may even not get there at all.

One solution would be to use your web hosting's provider's DNS servers. But these tend to not be very reliable either... and to say the least, they are very slow.

The Solution

So we went out to look for a dedicated DNS service provider. There are many but only a handful use AnyCast. AnyCast allows your visitors to use a DNS server closest to them, cutting latency times and getting their DNS queries answered 10 to 100 times faster than with standard UniCast DNS providers.

Out of these, only one has affordable pricing: DNS Made Easy . For less than $30/year can host DNS service for 10 domain at lightning speeds!

Measuring results

Go check out the speed of your current DNS service here at ultratools.com. Look at the max delays! With Moniker DNS servers you may get delays as long as 350 ms, if not flat out dropped requests! You can compare it with b2evolution.net since we use DNS Made Easy ourselves. You should see results as low as 3 ms!

Sometimes you will be given a dedicated server or a VPS and you won't know exactly which flavor or distribution of Linux it is running.

Here is how you can find out when logged in through SSH:

# uname -a

This generally won't tell you as much as you'd like.

# cat /proc/version

This will generally tell you more than you'd like.

Once you know that you are running Red Hat for example, you can get to the point with:

# cat /etc/redhat-release

Or on Debian:

# cat /etc/debian_version

When it comes to choosing a dedicated server, choosing between the offerings can be daunting, especially when looking at the processors! There are so many that it's almost impossible to compare them.

• There are two manufacturers with different technologies
• They each have several different product lines
• They have the same processors with different numbers of cores
• They have the same processors with different added features
• Within each product line there are different generations of chips
• Within each generation there are different clock speeds

It used to be relatively easy: 486 was better than 386 which was better than 286... but there are no numbers any more. Only cryptic names and multiple variations. If you're not a CPU geek, you're doomed...

My advice for most dedicated servers would be this: go for the one that has the most RAM. Then only try to compare processors. RAM is much more important than you'd think for servers, especially if you have database driven apps.

Now, what I frequently miss is a rough guide to what CPU is newer/better than which others. I tried to put this together below...

As I understand it, here's how I'd order the Intel processors, from the best to the weakest:

1. Itanium
2. Xeon
3. Core2 Extreme
4. Core2 Quad
5. Core2 Duo
6. Pentium Extreme
7. Pentium Dual-Core
8. Pentium D
9. Pentium 4 HT Extreme
10. Pentium 4 HT
11. Celeron Dual-Core
12. Celeron D
13. Celeron

Here's how I believe you could roughly rank AMD processors (from best to weakest):

1. Opteron Quad Core
2. Opteron Dual Core
3. Phenom
4. Athlon X2 Dual Core
5. Athlon 64
6. Sempron

Keep in mind that there are a lot of variations and lower ranked processor running at a higher clock rate (indicated in GHz) can be faster than a higher ranked processor running a a lower rate. However, double cores almost always beat single cores for servers, even at luch lower clock rates.

Now comparing Intel vs AMD chips is extremely difficult. It almost feels like comapring oranges and apples. So again, my advice would be: compare the number of cores. If one has more cores than the other, it's probably better.

Beyond that, you'd need to get into details about Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 caches, Front Side Bus speeds and other nerdy specs... Check intel.com and amd.com for juicy details!