Business these days works purely on mails. Except for the so called conventional businesses such as trading cement and pipes for construction at very low levels, emails may not be used, but anyone and everyone has got an email id, and a computer with an internet connection. The internet has become a place that has a highly growing demand for bandwidth, with the growing number of computers attached to it.

Free emaiils are suitable for induviduals. Everyone provides you with a free mail box and monetizes yoru mails with their advertisments in the footer. Gmail is a bit decent, hey dont attach any ads in the mail, but you could see ads in the inbox, ads from adsense, once that are relevent to the contents of the mail. Its not just once or twice that I have clicked on the ads displayed on google, and I have returned a considerable amount of money to google for their providing me with a free mail box.

Corporates dont like ads on their mails. And they cant send out mails from free mail boxes. So even if they dont have a website, they spend $10 a year to get a domain name and park it in some hosting. The best that a linux hosting can offer for free is smart mail or horde. And if you wish to switch isps, switching mailboxes would be a problem. Whats the best way to keep your mails safe and permanant?

Go for Google Apps. At google.com/a, you can get an unlimited number of free mail boxes to your domain name, and all you need to do is to change your MX entries as required on the hosting side, and no matter how many times your HSP’s server goes down for any reason, your mails are safe, and not a single mail would be bounced. Also, google offers an ever growing mail box, so you do not have to delete another mail. And, above all, to the best of most people’s knowledge, true spam blocking is offered only by google. Not a single message that you wish to be on the inbox gets into spam. And if you try to send spam, with 500 ids in the BCC field, they will block all your mails, and it will not go out, and you will not get a bounced report. So no one gets affected. If you over do that ofcourse you will be blocked.

When you change ISPs, you just need to add the MX records for google, and its very easy to do in a cpanel hosting, just follow the instructions there, and your mails will not be damaged in any ways. There will be ads in the free edition, as no one can give you anything for free. Even if you dont click on it, they will manage with the money that you get them for the impressions, and there is another package where they offer you a fully loaded account that will cost you $50 a year per user id, which includes phone support as well apart from several other things. And it gives you a lot more space as well. If you think you cannot tolerate ads, just pay them $50, why why pay, when you can get it all for free? A few ads running on the right side should not distract you much right?

And even if you pay this $50, you will find that its a lot cheaper from any mail server thats available outside. And google is always reliable, and there is not a single downtime that I have seen in their mail servers, and u ca use this account for ages and ages to come without any fear of loss of data or anything at ll. And the best of all is that your mail box size would be ever growing

Linux, especially ubuntu, is the best operating system that you could install in your computers at your office if you are running a hosting company. No point in getting Windows, paying for the license, getting bugged, and get it resulted in a weak server maintenance or admin work done.

For Windows servers, naturally, you use the remote desktop. Use the terminal services client, enter your servers IP, and a window opens asking for the username and password, enter that and you are logged into the remote desktop of your windows server. Do you find it not as good as the remote desktop client on your windows PC?

Here we go. Terminal services Clinet is a lot stable than windows remote desktop client. It never gets hanged, or refuses to come out of the remote desktop, leaving you in the middle, and forcing you to log out of the administrator and cancelling all your running applications on the server. You can always close the window to exit and log back in to the same session. Yes, windows remote desktop client is designed to do the same too, but it doesnt work very well. I have seen that myself.

And to connect to your linux servers, though there is putty for linux as well, you dont really need it except if you want to run any command or execute anything. For basic file operations, you could directly connect to the file system with ubuntu and do any file operations as required. With putty, you cannot transfer files from local machine or vice versa. Or maybe I have not come across the command for that.

You can stay connected to linux servers with your linux computers for days and months together if your internet connection or power supply for your local machine doesnt give you away, and you will find that it is completely stable, and not like windows which, as the world knows, will not run for more than 24 hours at a streatch.

If you are providing hosting, the most important thing that you need are your own web servers. You can ofcourse rent out servers from the most popular data centres in the world, but that would end up working out a lot more costlier than it would be when you just buy out the servers and co-locate them at any decent data hotel, of if you are in the US, just place them in your back yard and give it a good internet connection . But that wouldn’t be advisable. Let me tell you how to go about choosing the right server for you.

Advantages of buying and co-locating servers

1. You own the servers, No one can delete the data if for some reason the sites are suspended.

2. Just a moderate co-location charge needs to be paid towards co-location and ISP charges.

3. You can move servers between datacentres if required.

4. You don’t have to share your passwords to get into the servers with the people at the datacentre. Its fully private.

5. You can bring them back home when you want to, and run them from your spare bathroom if you feel like it.

Advantages of renting a server

1. You dont onw the server, so the hardware is the datacentre’s responsiblity.

2. OS level and hardware level support is free of charge, and is provided by the datacentre.

3. Low investment.

4. When you upgrade, you dont have to look for a waste basket to dump your old hardware. It is the data centre’s headache.

5. Flexiblity and support is great from datacentres for rented servers than co located servers.

There are disadvantages on both sides as well. As for Indyahozting, I have a big bunch of servers ranging from Celeron 1.3 GHz servers to Dual Core Conroe servers. All data centres sell servers too. At the time I bought them servers used to cost $800 to $1000 varying with the configuration, and these days it has come to $500 to $600.

So, how do you decide on the datacentre? Where would your servers feel at home? Which data center would help you give your clients the best service?

Contd…..