How to Pick An Optimum Payment Gateway For Your Merchant Processing Services?

Not every credit card merchant account can link straightaway to your shopping cart software. Hence, you require a payment gateway to link up your merchant processing services to your shopping cart order page. This permits it to communicate info between your merchant processing services account and your website. While they do not come along with extra services, you will observe that payment gateways also comprise of various additional features. If you are searching for a payment gateway, following are a couple of things for you to reckon:

Prices Associated With Payment Gateways For Credit Card Merchant Accounts:

Each payment gateway provider bills dissimilar fees and extends varied packages. Thus, ensure that you equate each of them cautiously prior to determining which one to buy. For instance, few providers may bill a huge setup fee while others charge none. And so, you will probably require forking out a monthly fee and a minor transaction fee in addition to any characteristics you have settled with.

Protection Features:

Since payment gateways communicate the customer’s sensitive fiscal information to and from your credit card merchant account while storing your personal info, they are the major targets of the hackers. This makes security mandatory and not something that you really should take lightly. Pay

Consequently, go with a provider like Planet Online that has a respectable reputation in the market and utilizes nothing but the finest security systems and data centers to make sure your merchant processing services info and your client’s fiscal info stays secret and safe.

Extra Payment Gateway Features:

You require to be acquainted with what your website has and does not have so as to forbid paying for the identical thing twice. Hence, when you investigate about payment gateways, be certain to inquire what comes along with it. This surely could comprise of a virtual terminal, repeating billing choices and e-checks. Before you make your ultimate decision, reckon what your demands are.

When looking for a payment gateway for your credit card merchant account, you’ will need to check each service to these details to realize how each of them stacks up. Then, you will also require discovering dependability, company reputation, client care, and your overall impression of the organization.

For E-commerce Hosting, Please contact Planet Online at 1.818.592.2999.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

Amazing benefits of MySQL

MySQL is an open source database package. It is component of a big and developing family of open source software inclusive of Linux, Apache, and programming languages like PHP and Perl. MySQL is a relationship database, which is an accumulation of items or tables organized into predefined categories or depicted tables from which information can be obtained or reassembled in a lot of dissimilar modes while not having to reorganize the database tables. Various benefits of using MySQL for your website are as follows:

•    Easy to use: An introductory understanding of SQL and database manipulation is needed however MySQL is logical and simple to utilize. This implies you do not have to shell out as much time and money either training subsisting faculty, or employing developers.

•    Security: There are not many databases that can match the protection that MySQL provides. It offers solid data security layers that protect your sensitive info. Rights can be specified to permit few or all privileges to either individuals or groups. Passwords are encrypted. The admittance to your database can be governed by a remote machine that can entirely manipulate what a user can see.

•    Capacity and memory: MySQL is designed for nearly any amount of data from just a couple of rows to as much as 50 million rows or more. The default file size limit is approximately 4 GB. It handles memory very efficiently, which implies that it works expeditiously and rapidly without crashing or dumping your data.

•    Invincible flexibility: MySQL functions on a lot of operating systems, including Novell NetWare, Linux, Windows, and UNIX.

•    It supports various development interfaces including JDBC, ODBC, and some scripting languages like PHP and Perl. This permits you to develop database solutions that operate on all major operating systems.

•    More than a single individual can obtain access to business info at one time. This indicates that a big group of people can obtain the info at once but there can also be various connections at one time.

•    Numerous storage engines, or types of table, permit you to pick out which one is most efficient.

•    Technical support: One of the drawbacks to several open source products is the belief that the support is often nonexistent or sluggish to answer at its best.  However, MySQL Enterprise extends support itself, admitting 24/7 30-minute response time and the support team has immediate access to the software developers.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

How to avoid Downtime for your Website?

Imagine that your website gives three days to its users to avail special discount for one of the services of your company, and the server where the site is hosted loses connection dues to a technical error. Such situations can wreck your business. Even a best quality dedicated server hosted by a good service provider may encounter a technical problem. If you can’t afford your site to be unavailable even for a few hours, you should seek an alternative.

A few good web hosting service providers offer an alternative solution – where you can ensure that your site is never down, not even for a few hours. An excellent DNS feature – Round Robin takes care of this issue where a particular IP address is fetched from a pool of IP addresses. This feature uses a technology where your domain name is mapped to more than one IP address on different servers.

The site is hosted at multiple servers and a Failover Monitor keeps a track on your web servers by sending data to a URL. When one of your IP addresses returns an error, the system pulls that IP address out of the list and the DNS adjusts your domain name to another working IP address.

As soon as the faulty IP address comes back online, the system restores it back to IP pool. This ensures that your site is always online, even if there is some problem in one of your web servers.

This system results in the downtime time of as low as fifteen minutes. This is the time taken in caching the IP information from different servers. A couple of factors that determine this caching time are – the connection speed of your site and the reason behind the failure. To ensure best results, your service provider can set the caching time for DNS information.

There is another option where even the time required to fetch the IP address from cache is also not consumed. A failure monitor that is based on an expensive hardware system can point a virtual IP address to other IP address on different servers. This involves very little downtime of a few minutes. This technology ensures almost 99.99995% uptime, and is available only with reputed hosting service providers.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

Ensuring that your Host offers decent Technical Support

One of the factors that add to the reputation of a good web hosting company is the kind of technical support that it provides to its users. The company is responsible for providing the right hardware and software concerns. Providing professional technical solution is a part of primary objectives of a good company.

Usually, good companies have a customer support centre, or a technical support center where their complaints and concerns are handled. A good and responsible hosting company should set a support staff that takes care of retaining the existing customers. This will enable the owner to focus on generating business by adding new customers.

Another point that you should note is the dependability and reliability of technical support staff of your host. If the technical team is not equipped to answer your calls, or provides wrong information, you can suffer huge loss. You should report to the owner if a technical engineer provides you with any incorrect information.

Ask the technical engineer if the hosting company has an automated problem tracking system. Note how the problems are tracked, how the record of clients is maintained, and how well the technical staff is equipped to handle customer concerns.

Most of the hosting companies boast 24/7 technical support. But it is true only for a few of those. You should ensure that your host has the technical staff that has the right knowledge of web technology, networking issues, and operating system platforms.

Document the issues that you face frequently so that you are not calling the technical team for the same concern repeatedly. Also, note down the availability hours and non-availability hours of technical team. Remember that you have to trust your host to deliver timely, correct, and useful support on issues and concerns that can affect your business.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

Purchasing Colocation Space

In colocation service, the server that you own will be connected to the Internet. The companies that offer this service can build for you a server if you don’t already have one. This may sound similar to dedicated servers, but there is a huge difference. With dedicated servers, the web hosting company owns the actual server, while with colocation the web hosting company basically connects the server that you own to the Internet. This is what makes the two different. Colocation services are meant for companies and individuals that desire to have absolute control over their server configurations. In other words these services are not meant for everyone. If you decide to use colocation web hosting, you will have complete control of the web server combined with the security of the data center.

If you are considering purchasing colocation space, you will need to think about two things, rental fees as well as connection fees. The costs that you will incur as a result of having your server located in the host’s data center, is what is considered as rental fees. The space is measured from one unit to a full rack, with most of the servers in the 1U or 2U category. If the server has scores of hard drives, they can then be as big as 3U or 4U. The rental fee usually varies, but it all depends on how big your server is. It also depends on all of the services that may or may not be included.

Connection fees are not measured by the total number of gigabytes that may be transferred. An average will be used instead of that. This can end up being a very confusing aspect of colocation charges. That is why it is important that before renting space with a colocation service, you should read and understand all the information.

If you are considering buying colocation space with any company, you should first get to know where they are physically located. In addition to this, get to know the type of physical infrastructure where your server and personal data will be stored securely. There are also a few things that you would need to ask about. Firstly you can inquire about whom else will be having access to your server and also about the bandwidth that will be made available to you. Find out about what other options and services will be made available to you. With any web host or server, your website should be available to visitors and customers at all times, so you need to consider the uptime guarantees that the company is offering you. All these questions have to be asked, since you will be paying for the premium of a colocation service. These questions will help you decide which service is ideal for you. A colocation service can be a great alternative for serious webmasters.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

Tips on Assessing the Disk Space You Need

Disk space is an integral part of any web hosting plan. No wonder disk space is the first thing people check while looking for a web hosting service provider. But disk space is not just the space that you need to host your website on. There is something more to it that you need to know to correctly assess the exact disk space that you require for your website.

Here are a few tips on assessing the disk space you need.

Have the right estimates

You are the best judge of the size of your website, what your website contains, and how many files are attached to it. You should have the right estimates with regard to the size and objectives of your website. You should be sure about the space you would require to store all your web files, databases, emails, and log files.

Besides, you need to know that different web hosting service providers have different usage provisions. If you have the right estimates, you will able to rightly gauge the disk space you need.

Know how to save the disk space

You should be wise enough to know how you can save the disk space. Check whether or not your web hosting service provider takes into account all kinds of file storage in your requisite quota of server space. If it does so, you can turn off your logs to save the disk space.

Act Smart

If you act smart and plan in advance, you can craftily maneuver the disk space. For example – if your inbox and email settings are a part of the disk space allocated to you, you can set the maximum size for every mail box, of course, if your web hosting service provider offers such an option. This will enable you to save your disk space from unnecessary overstuffing.

Furthermore, you can save a lot of disk space if you properly manage your daily logs by downloading and deleting them on a regular basis. Thus, you should smartly plan how to save the disk space. This will help you buy the disk space that you actually require. So, there would be no waste of space and money.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

Check Your Web Host’s Uptime

Uptime! Well, undoubtedly, it is one of the most important aspects of any web hosting deal. People all over the world yen for that magic 99.99% website uptime. Believe it or not, it is a real challenge for the web hosting service providers to provide you with 99.99% website uptime. And it’s quite drolly that every other web hosting service provider claims to provide you with a 99.99% uptime.

Therefore, it is your responsibility to correctly gauge whether or not your web hosting service provider can actually offer the magical uptime it promises. But before that, you need to understand what exactly does 99.99% website uptime mean. It will help you put things into perspective.

In simple words, 99.99% website uptime means that the total downtime for your website during a month does not exceed 40 minutes. Now, you can easily gauge the downtime for a day.

This is not all. Another aspect that you must take into account is the usual time of the day when the downtime occurs. You would not mind a downtime at the dozing business hours. However, if the downtime takes place at the peak business hours, it will rile you a lot. And in such a case, even the 99.99% uptime will not be able to please you, and rightly so!

The web hosting service providers that are actually able to provide 99.99% website uptime keep the monitoring intervals really short. Monitoring intervals refer to the time periods when the web hosting service provider checks the server to ensure that everything is working fine.

Ideally, for a web hosting service provider that claims to provide you with 99.9% uptime, the monitoring interval for each day should not exceed five minutes. And if it does, there is every reason for you to believe that your web hosting service provider is not giving you the promised 99.99% uptime.

Availability From a Business Perspective

There is a better way. Instead of settling for the one-size-fits-all approach of “nines of uptime”, set your own availability goals. The key is to examine availability from a business perspective:

•           What are my business-critical periods?

•           How much downtime is acceptable during off hours?

•           What kind of monitoring interval is needed?

•           How do we know if the application is down?

•           Who is actually doing the monitoring?

Always make a distinction between business hours and after hours. You should have different availability requirements for each period, even if your application is used 24×7. Next, create your goal using words and whole numbers, not percentages. For example:

•           Zero downtime during business-critical periods.

•           No more than 2 unscheduled downtime incidents per month of no more than 5 minutes per incident during after hours periods.

•           No more than 1 scheduled maintenance period per month of no more than 30 minutes during after hours periods.

•           Monitoring interval of 5 minutes.

•           Monitor key aspects of the application, not the server.

•           Independent third-party monitoring from multiple locations.

After defining exactly what your availability goals are, you can now strive to achieve it. The difference now is that your goal is 100% achievable. That’s a statistic you can count on.

Glen Kendell is a network architect and owner of Release to Production. He publishes a monthly newsletter called In-Production: Achieving True High Availability.   

 Web Hosting – Domain Registration

Web Hosting For Profit

 The web hosting business has really expanded over the years, and now choosing the right web host has proven to be quite a task. Selecting the right web hosting package is very crucial. If you end up choosing the wrong host you can easily end up losing a lot of money. To avoid this from happening there are a few things that you will need to consider when you are choosing a web host.

Choose only what you need

Once you have created your website, you would know what exactly your website needs. The next step would be for you to choose a web host that will cater to all the needs of your website. Don’t just think that because a package costs a lot of money, that it will take care of all your needs. Even the high cost web hosts can fall short of providing you with what you need in your website. Choose a web host that will save you money in the future.

Your web host is not your asset

When you are launching your website, you can never be sure of how many visitors you will receive every single day. In the beginning limit your space to certain specific space and its bandwidth. A package that comes with 1GB of space and 5GB of bandwidth would be sufficient to start with. Just keep an eye on the amount of traffic that your website will receive so that once it reaches 75% of your allowable bandwidth, you will know that it is time to look for another web host.  

Optimize your web space

If you are hosting a simple website or a blog, then you will not require a lot of web space. If your initial plan is to store lots of images, videos and numerous websites, then you would then require huge web space. Make that the package will allow you to host as many websites as possible as well as your domain names.

Paying extra doesn’t mean that you will lose

There are some web hosting companies that can make you sign a contract for a year and even offer you a discount to make it more appealing. Don’t go for this kind of offer. Try to pay by monthly payments so that you can see if the package will meet all your needs. If they are not able to do that, then you will be free to switch hosts at any time, since there will be no contract binding you.  

Choose the right control panel

Each control panel comes with its own functions and abilities, so only select what suits you. Some control panels are even customized by the web host themselves. If you select a wrong control panel, maintaining your website will become quite difficult. It would be wise to first try out the functions of each control panel before proceeding to make payment.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

Technique of Web Hosting

The technique of web hosting allows server or computers to host the website on the net. There are many web hosting service providers. Web hosting allows users to browse  websites available online. Also, it lets the account holder to store visual and textual information, apart from the other internet information available on website mediums.

There are several kinds of webs hosting options available. Some of the companies may even give you web hosting services for free while others charge you for it. Choosing the right web host is essential because the technique they use in this process would determine how smoothly your website would run online. How easily your viewers would be able to view and navigate it. It would help in determining the right working of your website and of course you will get to have more access over your website to make possible changes and updates from time to time. So what are the things that you need to keep in mind to get best web hosting service:

• Bandwidth
• Server Space
• Control Panel
• Support
• Script access

If you are a programmer and have good technical knowledge then you would want more control and access over your account. Dedicated host gives you more disk space and unlimited bandwidth. This is a wonderful option as you get to expand your business website anytime you want and you don’t have to pay extra for that. You are the sole user of the server and you get better security as well. All these features of web hosting services are better enjoyed in dedicated web hosting service

If you choose a shared one then also you can get access but of course that would be limited. If your website needs are less and you have a low budget then shared hosting service will serve for all your needs.  Then there is VPS hosting which is similar to shared hosting in many ways but offers you more privacy and better access to your account. It is dependent on your website needs as which server you choose since the technique used in all is different so you get to enjoy different benefits, facilities and features.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

What is an FTP client and How to Use it?

Creating an attractive website can be a daunting task, particularly when you are doing it manually. There are many tools that can be utilized to automate and accelerate the process, but many people who try to do it themselves are not very much aware of these tools. A major tool that a website owner would require to know is the FTP tool. FTP is acronym of File Transfer protocol, and it allows you to upload your website content from an external hard drive to your website easily.  With an FTP client uploading your files becomes easy but if you don’t use it then you may have to individually upload content on your website which can be time consuming.

What FTP Client Should You Use?

If you have a small budget then you should be aware that there are several free FTP clients that will do all you require with ease. FileZilla is one FTP client that many people use over the web. If you are running a corporate website that is high in demand then you must look out for paid FTP clients that will offer you better features.  There are many large businesses that use free FTP clients so if feel your business needs are not satisfied by a free FTP client, you can choose a paid one.

Using the FTP Client

It is very easy to use an FTP client, although it can appear intimidating initially, the program is usually designed in a way to make it easier for the user to learn its usage quickly and upload content to your website easily and quickly. Initially you will have to make yourself aware of the FTP interface. Usually all FTP clients come with the same central design. The right side is devoted to the website whereas the left side is devoted to the hard drive. The top side of the interface is for the folders whereas the bottom shows the files contained in those folders. When you click on a folder you can see the files contained in it in the bottom display. If you wish to upload content then you just need to right click on the desired file on the FTP client’s left side panel and click on upload. With this simple method you can quickly upload several files at one time by holding the CTRL key.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration