A fully dedicated server has got a lot of resources that it can be shared amoung so many sites. But certain clients do not wish to let their sites bein a shared environment where others can overload, and that overload can affect your site, and your downtime could nto be compensated easily by anything.

But at the same time, they might find a dedicated server for a few sites that they have to be quite expensive, and that they might not need so much of resources. What do they do? They go to virtual servers.

You buy a server, and a Virtuozzo or a Xen license, install it on your OS, and you have your virtual serers on a dedicated server ready You can have as many virtual servers as your operating system permits. In linux, it is virtually unlimited, and you can create as many virutal enviromnets as you like, but a windows server has got its limitations. It also, does depend on your license.

You could go for openvz for linux, the open source server virtualization software, and since it doesnt come with any licnese fee, it would cost you a lot less, though that gain would vanish away when you employ specialists in that line of server administration.

You can set the Processor, Memory and hard drive resources, and unlike in a shared environment, you will have these resources always on the standby for you, and no one else would be using it, even if its being unused. So, virtually, except for its physical configurations, it is a dedicated server.

Various applications of server virtualization will follow this article soon.

Personally, I have felt better using SSH for uploading files to the server in Linux. I have got ubuntu on all pcs at my office, and with that I can connect directly to the linux server just as you open an ftp on a windows server with your internet explorer.

You just create a new server connection, select FTP over SSH or SFTP, enter your username and password, and if you have the admin or the root password, you can transfer files easily with sftp. Whats the benefit? You dont have to worry about Ascii and Binary upload settings, particularly when you are uploading zend or ion cube files, sftp does it better than plain old ftp.

Even with Filezilla, you could choose to upload thru sftp. But the SSH is strictly for the admins, and do not give access to ftp for any clients or resellers. Retain it as a personal privilege.

Looks like google thinks that my blog is way too diversified. Look at teh number of categories. What I should have done was, I should have put the posts that lie in a few number in their respective categories now into the general category or should just have left them uncategorized.

I hate to admit it, but it was my brother who told me that there is this possiblity. He is the one who is gives me all these advises most of the time. Because other friends fear competition I guess.

Therefore, I have secided to start a few more blogs around subjects. Havent decided on the domain names yet actually.  But I can tell you that it would all start with Ravi. So if you feel like gambling, buy all the domain names that you can think of that starts with Ravi, and offer it to me for sale. If i buy it you win, otherwise you loose. But you get to use the domain for a blog of your own.

If you choose to offer shared hosting from a web server that you own or have rented, you need to think twice, and primarily have the operating system on the server in mind. There are various distributions of Linux such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOs, Red Hat, FreeBSD etc that you could use in the linux or unix like platforms. This is one part, and the other is Our Very Own Bill Gate’s Creation, the Crappy Old Microsoft’s Windows NT (Doesn’t)Work Station based Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Server Edition.

Fortunately, unlike the PC market, Linux domainates the server industry completely. Nearly 85% of all web servers run on linux. Server Admins like linux since it is trouble free, is a lot stable, wont crash like windows does, is a lot secure, and is a lot efficient. But still, Microsoft Enthusiasts who wish to make their websites only with ASP and MSSQL server, should opt only for windows, since Linux doesnt really support it.

Linux is the best server operating system. There is Solaris ofcourse, and there are mainframes, but when it comes to shared web hosting on 32 or 64 bit servers, it is linux that rocks, and not really windows.

But still, a restaurant that serves Chicken should serve toothpicks as well. So, if you run a hosting company, give priority to linux, and keep the number of windows server on your portfolio minimal. The best way to reduce demand for windows hosting is to keep the price of windows packages extremely high. If the price is something like double that of the price you offer linux hosting for, no one would go for windows naturally unless they really need it.

Likewise, the costs for Windows servers are certainly higher than that of linux servers with all those license fees and stuff. You are literally paying Microsoft for the bugs that they have put in their operating systems, and not for any quality that they have put in their work on the Operating System that they have put up for sale.

1. Linux servers dont need defragmentation. Windows needs that every week, and when your server runs 24×7, you cant really find time or the resources to do the defrag, and when you are doing that, you will find that the sites that you have hosted on the server are really really slow.

2. Linux doesnt need a virus scanner. Windows needs a minimum of 2 virus scanners running on them to monitor the sites and the files that are being uploaded and downloaded from the sites. This consumes considerable processor and memory resources.

3. Linux servers dont need a restart at all. They can run without restarts for months together without any problems. I havent restarted my server for atleast 4 months If im right. I ofcourse restart the services from the server such as SMTP server POP3, Apache etc from the services management, but have never rebooted the server once in the past 4 months or even more. And I restart my Windows server every day. You will see a downtime of 7 Mins every day if you are following the uptime rating of the sites on the server. There is no other way. The server has to be restarted. The Ram completely craps up the server speed, and restarting the services or any operation doesnt help. Only a full server reboot, that results in a complete shutdown of all sites for 7 minutes would help.

4. The best security feature of Linux is that it comes with all its ports closed by default while being installed. You will have to open a port if you need to use it, and if it remains unused for quite some time, it will automatically get closed. That is the best security feature that Linux has. You cannot hack into a Linux server easily. Windows installs with all ports wide open and inviting, and to close them and monitor them, you need to install port monitoring software, which costs money, and resources.

5. The Linux file system never fails or crashes. Windows File System can fail at any time. Linux file systems are very easy on the hard drives, and work hard to keep the drives cool and give longer life to them and keep your data safe. Windows tortures the hard drives just as Hitler tortured the Jews. You can test this yourself on your local PC, install LInux and listen to the sounds that the hard disk produces during normal operation, and chekc the same after installing Windows. You can literally hear it screaming.

6. Linux is a trillion times better when it comes to parallel processing than Windows. So on a server that is shared between clients, everyone would be using a part of the resources, and the resource allocation is a lot simpler in Linux than in Windows, and therefore, the load on the processor is lesser, and you get better results on the performance.

7. There is nothing much that you cannot do on a Linux server thru SSH, and on Windows, you cant do a thing with the Console that they provide, and most of the time you will need to get on to the remote desktop to run command Line instructions.

8. Linux is best for mails. Everything is free and open source. Just install linux on your server and install Exim, and your mail server is ready. In windows, you can go for the free Mail Enable, which sucks completely, or you can pay that huge license fee and get a Microsoft Exchange Server License, which is, by default, filled with bugs as always.

9. Linux is perfect for file server and ftp server requirements. It can manage any number of hard drives connected to the server with ease, and with absolutely no struggle. Windows suffers a lot in managing 2 hard drives parallely. Though they say Windows 2008 does support large number of Hard Drives, I still think it cannot match Linux. Then again, distribution of multiple files on the ftp server to multiple clients can be handled well only by Linux, and Windows wont do that at all. It will struggle and it will make the server struggle.

10. Linux supports PHP, CGI, Perl etc, while windows supports all these ad ASP and MSSQL. People done really realize that these software released by Microsoft are full of bugs, and most of them are intentionally placed. SQL is the same everywhere. MySql is free, and it doesnt mean that it is insecure, and just because MSSQL comes with an expensive license means that it is secure. Banks and other people who are serious about their data never go for MSSQL. They go straight to Oracle. So who does need MSSQL? No one really. Microsoft is just a company that produces software that really should be banned. There are better software in Open Source. And people who really dont understand this go for ASP and MSSQL, while they dont realize that PHP can do better than these.