Have you ever seen hosting providers offering unlimited space or unlimited bandwidth in their hosting package? We bet you have seen it. Some hosting providers use those two terms as marketing traps to attract their customers. We use the term “traps” because the term unlimited for space & bandwidth surely don’t exist.

How do we prove it?
Simple, have you ever heard about harddisk with unlimited capacity?

No such thing ever existed. Never! So how can the hosting providers claim that they can host your website with unlimited disk space quota?

So how about unlimited bandwidth?
Every hosting providers have their own contract with ISP that provide their internet connections. ISPs have the price for internet connections based on bandwidth. The higher the bandwidth, the higher the price would be. However, no ISP has ever offered a package for unlimited bandwidth.

ISPs offer only unlimited access with limited bandwidth, not unlimited bandwidth. So, how can hosting providers can have hosting packages with unlimited bandwidth while they have limited bandwidth from their ISP?

Read the rest of this entry »

Webmasters often confuse deciding whether to use dedicated IP or shared IP. The purpose of using dedicated IP is actually based on the website requirements of two things:

1. SSL (Secure Socket Layer)

Websites that use SSL are those that need secure / encrypted data transfer between web server and visitor’s browser, such as e-commerce websites, corporate portals that contain confidential information, corporate webmail, etc.

With SSL, information transferred from web server to visitor’s browser will always be encrypted. Data encryptions are used to scramble the information that is being transferred so that any attempt to steal the information, while it’s still on its way, will be useless as the data they captured have been encrypted and can only be decrypted by the legitimate visitor’s browser.

However, in order to install a SSL certificate onto a website or domain, the domain must be configured with a dedicated IP.

2. Anonymous FTP

Websites that offer file download sometimes want to have anonymous FTP enabled. Anonymous FTP is used to let visitors download files from web server through FTP without having to provide user name & password. In order to enable the anonymous FTP, the domain must be configured with a dedicated IP.

So, based on the two requirements explained above, you can now easily decide whether using dedicated IP or shared IP.

It’s better to take the decision since the very first time, as changing from shared IP to dedicated IP or vice versa will cause the website to be inaccessible during DNS propagation which can take from 24 hours up to 72 hours.

If you encountered ”Directory Listing Denied – This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed” error message on Windows Hosting, it is probably because you use index.php as your main file.

By default, HSphere does not include index.php as directory index or main file on Windows Hosting. That means, if you want to use index.php as your main file, you will need to modify your directory index setting in you hosting control panel and put index.php as your directory index.

Read below article for detail info:

Directory Indexes

This tool allows you to set your own index pages instead of those specified in the default settings. In other words, you can tell your visitors’ browsers which page to load as they hit your domain. Usually, it’s /index.html by default, but you can set any other custom welcome page.

Example: If a visitor goes to your site http://www.example.com, the first page to open will be http://www.example.com/index.html. However, if you set /welcome.html as the directory index, the page to open will be http://www.example.com/welcome.html.

Warning: your custom index pages won’t add to the defaults; they will replace them. Therefore, make sure to enter the full list of indexes you would like to have in your configuration.

Read the rest of this entry »