Category Archives: Dedicated Server

22 Jun

Know The Warning Signs That Your Business Could Benefit From Managed Hosting

In the lifecycle of any business, there are certain stages, rites of passage, or turning points that enable further growth. Remember when you started out and you wore 150 different hats from sales to HR? As your business grows, you have the luxury of specializing tasks – both for yourself and your team.

One of the most beneficial points in your business’ growth is the ability to turn over your technology support to the professionals. Whether you’ve managed your IT personally or tasked your HR manager to take care of it, there comes a point when your business has scaled enough that IT becomes more than just a necessary headache – it can become a strategic advantage to fuel further growth.

How do you know if your business could benefit from managed hosting?

IT projects sit on the to-do list for weeks.

Updating your website, technology, or adding systems get pushed to the back burner because you don’t have time to research how to do it, then try to implement it. Plus, what if you accidentally break something? Without a dedicated professional to manage your online assets, it’s difficult to make necessary improvements.

You know your technology could better support your business.

Do you have the same hosting provider, support team, and infrastructure as you did when you started your business? Maybe your team, client base, and revenue has grown but your technology hasn’t grown with it? Finding a hosting provider that can scale with you and provide services above and beyond your current needs is crucial to businesses who are looking to maintain a steady growth.

New employees throw a wrench in your process.

New employees mean new email addresses and phone numbers, not to mention new hardware. If you’ve ever had a new employee show up on their first day without their computer ready for them to use and their phone set up, it may be time to seek out some help.

You dread change because you’re not sure how it will affect your IT systems.

Above and beyond new employees, an acquisition, software upgrade, or even new data regulations all could have major impacts on your infrastructure. Take the recent changes to information and data storage with the GDPR. Wouldn’t it have been nice not to stress about what that meant for your business and simply rely on professionals to ensure your compliance?

When you experience technical issues, it feels like you have to go around in circles to find an answer.

Sick of trying to track down the person or support team who can handle your issue? Feel like your issues get passed from person to person with no one taking responsibility? With managed hosting services from Softsys Hosting, we know that the buck stops with us. Our support team is available around the clock to make sure your issues are solved ASAP.

Think your business is ready to turn your IT into a strategic advantage? Contact Softsys Hosting today to learn more about how we can help.

13 Jun

How To Ensure That You Choose Secure Web Hosting?

The Internet is full of exciting web hosting offers, all having their own set of features and pricing options. The main reason behind varying prices is the cost of latest hardware, server maintenance, and security. Some web hosting providers can offer hosting services at dirt cheap prices because they keep using outdated server hardware with no to little maintenance following poor security standards. That being said it’s important for you to choose the most secure web hosting available.

When you think of website security, the recent security breaches of major companies would come to your mind. Your site might not be that large, but whether large or small, secure web hosting environment is equally important for all. In this post, we’ll cover some key security features to look for in a prospective web hosting company.

Backups And Restore Points

While you look for web hosting services, a redundant backup is a mission-critical security feature you should check for. Simply, you can ask a potential web host about their backup/restore policy, backups retention, available backup set, etc.

Here are some of the questions you can shoot to a sales guy — How frequently backups are being taken, daily, weekly, or monthly? How many backup sets are available on any given point of time? How many backup restorations are allowed? Will the support reps help you restore your site from backup files? Do you provide account level backups or file/directory level backups?

Many web hosting providers include the daily backup service with the hosting plan, taking backup of your data on the daily basis. Whereas some web hosts offer weekly and monthly backups for free, but daily backup as an add-on service. Obviously, daily backups are the best option which allows you to restore the latest version of your website in case of data corruption or any other form of data loss.

An option of “manual backup” option is also offered, whereby you can take the backup yourself every time you have something updated on the website. It’s important to go through all the backup conditions before purchasing the hosting service. It would be good if backups are taken on secure offsite location rather in the server itself so you can always have trusted repository for the latest copies of data.

Antivirus And Malware Scanning & Removal

When sites are online, in a way there are exposed to online threats like hacks, malware, PHP shells, backdoors, spyware, viruses, and whatnot. There are fair chances your site also could get infected if sufficient security measures not taken by your web hosting provider. Sometimes, websites got hacked because of poor code, bugs, script/plugin loopholes or software vulnerability.

While you choose  web host, you should understand which protective actions they will perform to protect the site from these threats.  Ask the sales guy if their hosting server is installed with anti-malware, anti-virus software? Does the server run regular scans on the web files? Can customer run the scan itself from the control panel? In case your account is infected, can support help in identifying and removing the malware?

Most of the hosts provide real-time malware protection that can detect and quarantine the threat as soon as it is uploaded to hosting space. Real-time scanning keeps the sites secure and helps prevent site from being blacklisted in search engines.

High Uptime And Disaster Recovery

Uptime can be defined as the time a website stays online. Select a web hosting provider that can provide you with at least 99.9% (43 minutes and 12 seconds per 30 days) uptime or better. Note that a small outage is fine as long as you are just a start-up without many visitors. Typically, when web hosts fail to keep uptime promise, they pay you reimbursement for the downtime. Some host claim providing 100% uptime, which is not true in most cases.

Additionally, web servers must be equipped with the redundancy to protect against downtime caused by hardware, networking or power failures. In this setup, each device, server hardware, server cooling equipment, power supply matrix and networking devices run in pairs, with each one ready to take over the full load in case the other one fails.

Firewalls And DDoS Protection

Firewall & DDoS Prevention

Mostly of big and lucrative sites become the target of DDoS attacks. Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks take place when a huge amount of traffic is sent to your site using cumulative resources of a number of zombie computers (online hacked systems). When this attack happens it renders the site useless to visitors. DDoS attacks can be prevented if web server is equipped with the hardware firewall at the edge of the network. However, there are limits to how well a firewall stops DDoS attacks.

Can your provider give you full DDoS protection? If yes what’s the capacity? Is it a hardware firewall or software firewall? At what stage will the network monitoring staff will inform you of potential problems that might affect your website?

If your web host offers all the features mentioned in this post, then you’re probably in good hands and they’re taking your network security seriously.

23 Apr

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Softsys Hosting Opens Two Brand New Data Centers

Here at Softsys Hosting, we’re dedicated to continually pushing the envelope and providing the best hosting service possible to all regions of the globe. That’s why we’re so excited to announce the opening of TWO new state of the art data center locations. Our 5th and 6th data centers were built with you in mind:

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Looking for FAST connectivity to the entire Middle East region? Our new UAE servers are housed in an enterprise location and offer access to the surrounding area along with global connection. They are perfect for businesses that require data to stay in the UAE and want to work with a provider they can trust.

Not located in the Middle East? These servers are still a great solution for businesses that want to offload part of their data to a secondary region.

All UAE Servers have 500GB SSD included and feature 100% premium hardware components to make sure you have the ultimate peace of mind.

AUSTRALIA

Get connected down under with our brand new Sydney data center! Customers requiring Australia-based server hosting and direct customers from Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and other Asia Pacific locations will enjoy fast network performance and guaranteed 99% uptime from our new Australia servers.

All Sydney servers have DDoS protection included and are priced very competitively compared to other hosts in the region.

Our flagship server management services will also be available for dedicated servers at both new locations!

Want to reserve your server space in one of our brand new locations? We’re offering a $35/month discount for LIFE for everyone who signs up by May 1st. Use the code 35OFF-UAE-AUS at either of the links below to get started.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

AUSTRALIA

We look forward to serving you from Australia and the UAE!

31 Mar

Is Cloud Hosting An Ideal Choice For Websites With Increasing Resource Requirements?

In recent years, the term “Cloud Hosting” has created lots of buzz in the web hosting industry. If you know a little bit of a web hosting, you might have come across this term many times. Thanks to its increased popularity, more and more web hosts have started offering this hosting solution. This has not only benefited the customers by giving them a wide web host choices, but it has also reduced the cloud cost with the increased competition in the market.

softsys cloud virtual servers

What Is Cloud Hosting?

The term “Cloud Hosting” is commonly used to refer multiple clustered servers that are being used to serve all the aspects of hosting your site. That means, your website will utilize the virtual resources of several connected servers instead of using one single powerful machine.

Thus, the server load is balanced and adequate hosting resources are available in the pool so they can be used whenever needed. This distributed nature of the cloud hosting makes it easy to scale up or scale down as required and hence resource bottleneck is almost never an issue since more computing power can be added on demand.

Who Can Benefit From Cloud Web Hosting?

What if your website becomes extremely popular overnight, and it starts putting a strain on the resources supplied by your shared plan. Well, definitely you’ll need a better solution that can accommodate the growing resource requirements of your site. That’s where cloud hosting comes into play.

Now, suppose you are not hosted under cloud environment, your account will get suspended immediately, and you’ll have to scramble to get your site back up and running on a next higher hosting solution as soon as possible.

On a second thought, you may think of a dedicated hosting where your website resides on its own dedicated environment. The problem with a dedicated hosting is that it’s far more expensive than your traditional shared hosting, and it demands a certain level of web hosting skills. Whereas with cloud hosting, you can overcome most of the challenges that come with the shared and dedicated hosting options.

Now suppose, your website is hosted in the cloud environment, and it starts receiving heavy traffic suddenly. Instantly, you are allocated with the more resources so your users see no degradation of services. When you no longer need these additional resources, you can release them easily. Thus, websites with heavy traffic or websites which are anticipating the resource usage spikes can benefit from this hosting option.

softsys cloud dedicated servers

Scalability

Scalability is one of the primary advantages cloud hosting, that means you can spin up additional resource almost instantly as you grow. When your site requires additional resources like processing, bandwidth or private memory – you don’t have to contact the support to assist you in increasing the resources. With cloud web hosting you can increase your available resources immediately and importantly when you need them most. This resource allocation process is seamless and your visitors on your site will never see any change.

Pay For What You Use

Most of cloud hosting services run on the “pay for what you use” model, this can actually save you a lot of money. Earlier it used to be the case, when you outgrow shared hosting package then your only other option was to move to a dedicated hosting.

A dedicated hosting is indeed a powerful option to host a website, but it cost you more. Eventually, you will end up paying for the dedicated resources that you don’t utilize.Thus, the money spent was wasted on unused services. However, with cloud hosting what you pay for is the resources you use. When you no longer need them you release them and you are no longer charged for them.

Highest Data Security & Availability

The resources of a cloud server are available from a number of physical machines, rather than being served from a single physical machine. Thus, cloud hosting users get benefits of an extensive server redundancy. This ensures that potential outages of server components affect neither the data security nor the availability of the provided resources.

Each of the cloud components is running with its redundant component, this makes the cloud very tolerant of faults. Apart from that cloud hosting providers are constantly working to safeguard their data security in accordance with national and international legislation.

14 Feb

A Few Reasons To Switch To SSD Powered Servers In 2018

SSD Servers

 

According to Jim O’Reilly, a well known author and storage consultant:

“In 2016, we will stop putting hard disk drives in our servers. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have reached a tipping point. Compared with traditional spinning hard disk drives (HDDs), SSDs have much lower latency, as much as 1000 times the number of I/Os per second (IOPS) and three to five times the throughput. Coupled with price parity or better, server SSDs could rapidly replace internal HDDs as soon as this year.”

You’ve probably heard of SSD servers! Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are non-mechanical storage devices consisting of NAND flash memory. Unlike traditional HDD drives, SSDs don’t have moving mechanical parts or rotating disks, etc. that are prone to failure. They use most popular and faster form of flash memory “NAND” to provide fast access to information, and therefore it offers significant performance gains compared to those HDDs.

In this article, we have compiled a few reasons to switch to SSD powered servers.

Dedicated Servers Hosting

 

1. Superfast Performance

With SSD drives, each server operation is performed on the blink of an eye, be it a server boot, heavy program loading or bulk data copying. SSD powered server responses almost instantly. As we mentioned, SSDs don’t have rotating platters so that they don’t have to seek out the data on a moving platter that gives significant boost to your server performance.

On an average, SSD dedicated servers have recorded the OS boot time of 8-12 seconds compared to those HDDs that have boot time of 25-40 seconds. As far as bulk data operations concerns, SSDs have read-write speed ranges between 300 MB/s to 500 MB/s, whereas conventional HDDs has read-write speed of 100 MB/s to 200 MB/s.

2. Long-Lastingness

Regardless of the brand you purchase, HDDs have an average life expectancy of 3 to 5 years. This is our common experience as after 3 to 5 years, HDD starts giving you problems and eventually it crashes. In some cases, they fail long before the lower end but in majority cases, you should seriously consider a new HDD after 3 years. After 5 years, you are running it on the risk of the data loss.

On the other hand, SSDs have life expectancies of more than 7 years and several cased it is has reached to decades. In any case, you can expect SSDs to last 2 to 3 times longer than to those HDDs.

3. Low Failure Rate

We know that any mechanical or electrical device has to fail one day as it can’t last forever. The chance of failure increases when that device consists of mechanically moving parts. It is said that hard disks can fail at any time between 15 seconds and 10 years. Whereas SSDs have very low failure rates in comparison of mechanical drives. As per the study conducted in Google data centers on SSD use, “flash drives have a significantly lower replacement rate in the field” than hard disk drives.

4. Smooth Dedicated Server Operation

SSDs have excellent access and seek times, also they are almost 30% faster than those mechanical drives. That being said, you can have faster data backups, faster antivirus full system scans, accessing applications, surfing websites and blazing fast data access capabilities without any lag time.

5. Heat Dissipation

We all know that heat can lower down dedicated server performance or possibly damage its components. This is only reason, why data centers are situated on chilly place.  Due to its low power consumption and no moving parts, SSD produce very less heat. Less heat means lower cooling requirements, which in turn means reduced costs.

07 Dec

High-End Dedicated Server Choices Of 2017

High-end dedicated server is probably the most suitable hosting solution for the complex websites and mission-critical applications which demand higher resources. These high performance hosting solutions ensure that your website performance is smoother and your website visitors get the best user experience.

The websites having several million visitors simply cannot be hosted on VPS or an entry level dedicated server. That’s where high-end servers come into play.

What Is A High-End Dedicated Server?

As we know that a typical dedicated server is a powerful computer, connected to a high-speed Internet connection and housed in a state-of-the-art data center facility.

A high-end dedicated server is an advanced system, equipped with the powerful CPUs, bigger RAM modules, RAID disks and backups. It features larger computing capacity, specially designed to achieve maximum performance and to cater enterprise workloads.

High-End Dedicated Servers Configuration

High-end dedicated servers are typically used to host high-traffic websites, web applications, and for other hosting scenarios where performance is paramount. A typical high-end dedicated server will consist of the following:

  • Single/Dual latest Intel Xeon E3 or E5 series processors.
  • 64 GB to 512 GB RAM.
  • 8 to 24 TB SATA II HDD with RAID 10.
  • Redundant power supply & cooling units.
  • Daily backups.

Above is just a sample configuration which can be customized/upgraded per unique requirements.

High-End Dedicated Server Use Cases

So far we’re aware of what a high-end dedicated server is and its basic configuration. Now, let’s take a look at how they’re used.

Hosting HyperVisors

Setting up a HyperVisor server and hosting smaller virtual machines on it, could be the most popular use of high-end servers. Typically hosting providers use these high-end servers to host a number of virtual machines and sell to their customers. In some cases, businesses also rent a big dedicated server to create a small virtual machines to use them internally.

Hosting High-Traffic Websites

To host a website that attracts thousands of concurrent requests (like an eCommerce store) is resource intensive, and many webmasters choose to “scale up” to a more powerful server, rather “scaling out” across many less powerful servers. Choosing a single high-end dedicated server is less complex to manage than building out a cluster of smaller servers.

Building A Web Server To Host Multiple Websites

Mostly web hosting companies and web service providers build their products on high-end servers. A moderately configured high-end server is capable of hosting hundreds or even thousands of smaller sites.

Building A Private Cloud

Both private and public cloud platforms are built on high-end dedicated servers, but many organizations prefer their own cloud to host their proprietary applications. In such case, many organizations choose to rent a dedicated server on which to run their own private clouds, virtual machines and other hosting services.

Softsys High-End Dedicated Hosting

Softsys Hosting offers a high-end dedicated setup starting from $244/month which includes an IP address, Intel Xeon E3-1230v2/v3 3.3GHz, 32GB RAM, DDoS protection, free control panel, SSD/HDD storage and 1 Gbps connectivity without any setup fees. Here are some pre-configured high-end dedicated server configurations.

Configuration #1

» Dual Intel Xeon E5-2620v3 2.4GHz 6C/12T
» Location: Chicago, IL – USA/Denver, CO – USA
» RAM: 128GB DDR4 ECC REG
» HDD 1: 960GB SSD
» Operating System: CentOS 7.x x64
» Control Panel: cPanel (Free)
» Network Port Speed: 1Gbps Dedicated
» Bandwidth: 10TB per mon
» IPv4 Addresses: 1
» DDoS Protection: Automatic Detection / Null Routing

Monthly: $510.00 USD

Configuration #2

» Dual Intel Xeon E5-2620v3 2.4GHz 6C/12T
» Location: Chicago, IL – USA/Denver, CO – USA
» RAM: 128GB DDR4 ECC REG
» HDD 1: 960GB SSD
» Operating System: Windows Server 2016/ 2012/ 2008 STD Edition
» Control Panel: Plesk/WebsitePanel/MSPControl (Free)
» Network Port Speed: 1Gbps Dedicated
» Bandwidth: 10TB per mon
» MS SQL Server: MS SQL Server 2014/ 2012/ 2008 Express Edition
» IPv4 Addresses: 1
» DDoS Protection: Automatic Detection / Null Routing

Monthly: $560.00 USD

If you are looking for some specific configuration, you can contact our sales team to discuss your custom setup. Our solutions architect will work closely with you to design a tailored environment in accordance with all your needs.

21 Nov

What Dedicated Server To Choose If You Don’t Want To Compromise On Performance?

You’ll require a dedicated server, either when your shared or VPS hosting account is no longer capable to meet current hosting needs, or you’re planning to launch a brand new project which demands higher server resources. In either cases, you don’t want to compromise with the server performance, right?

Choosing a dedicated server with the best performance is actually difficult, when there are significant options available in the market. It’s indeed an important decision so you just can’t head to any other web host and order a generic dedicated server. So this guide will explain some basic principles how you can choose a dedicated server with the best performance without spending a fortune.

Processors

The desktop-grade processors like Intel’s Core i5 or i7 are adequate for many small businesses with just basic requirements. However, to deploy a huge CPU processing, definitely you’ll need business-grade processors like Intel’s Xeon series CPUs.

These processors produce great processing power due to their Hyper-Threading architecture, multiple cores, bigger L3 caches and ability to handle intensive loads, which make them more suitable for server environment.

Also, Xeon series CPUs support ECC (Error-Correcting Code) memory, which can detect and correct most common data-corruption even before it takes place, ensuring the data integrity and stability of the system.

To get the best out of your high performance dedicated server, we’d suggest you to go with the Xeon E7 v6 family – the latest generation of high-end processors with improved performance and efficiency. Though you may still find v5 and v4 Xeon servers available in the market, and they are quite capable to deliver decent performance till date. You can also get the latest generation of low-end Xeon chips like E3 and E5, typically used in entry-level servers.

If you are an AMD fan, then you can go with its business-grade processors launched under

Opteron family, ranging from the entry-level 3000 series to powerful 6000 series.

Memory

For the entry-level servers, RAM typically ranges from 8GB to 64GB, which can be further expanded from 128 to 512 GB for high-end servers. These memory modules come in different types and speeds, which are dependent upon the processor and motherboard. For example, 2,400MHz ECC DDR4 memory is the standard for most entry-level Xeon-based servers.

However, RAM speed has far less impact on overall performance of a dedicated server, so it’s okay if you go with lower MHz memory modules. Also, your server must have capability to upgrade the RAM for the future expansion, so you don’t have to migrate to another server.

Storage Type

While configuring the server, you can choose between solid state drives (SSD) or a traditional option of hard disk drives (HDD). HDDs feature a spinning platter and a read/write arm that uses magnetism to store data. SSDs don’t have moving parts and keep information in flash microchips. For these characteristics, SSDs are much faster and more expensive.

For the best performance, we’d suggest mounting all SSDs on the server or go at least with the hybrid option for better performance. With the hybrid option, operating system is installed on SSDs, and standard HDDs are used to store files.

The hybrid option does not deliver the performance like all SSD setup, but it can be considered as a good compromise between performance and price.

RAID

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is vital for any multi-disk dedicated server as it increases the performance and reliability of data storage. The most common types of RAID are:

  1. RAID 0: It stripes data across multiple drives to improve the performance, though one of the drives fail all the data will be lost.
  2. RAID 1: It mirrors/copies the same data on 2 drives, so if one of the drives fail there’s  still a complete and usable copy of the data on the other drive.
  3. RAID 5: It requires at least 3 drives. It stripes the data and adds “parity data” so that any one of the drives fails, it can be replaced with the new drive promptly without losing the data.
  4. RAID 10: It’s the combination of the striping and mirroring.
  5. RAID 50: It’s the combination of the striping and parity.

Many entry-level servers come with RAID 0 or 1 with limited options, but it’s better to go at least with the RAID 5 or RAID 10. For the Windows-based dedicated servers, hardware RAID is more common, wherein its advantages are better realized. In contrast, software RAID is more popular in open-source systems, wherein its low-cost makes it an attractive option.

Traffic & Bandwidth

Traffic or “data transfer”, is the volume of data transmitted between your server and the web over a certain period of time (monthly in most cases). It is measured usually in gigabytes (GB) and terabytes (TB). So if you buy a server with 100TB traffic limit, that means there’s a limit of 100TB of data that can be passed between your server and web during the month.

Bandwidth is described as a data transfer rate of a dedicated server, or the amount of data network is capable to transmit over a given period of time. It is measured in Megabits per second (Mbps) and sometimes Gigabits per second (Gbps). Dedicated server bandwidth typically ranges between 100 Mbps and 10Gbps, with 1 Gbps a common bandwidth for high performance dedicated servers.

Some providers offer dedicated server with unmetered traffic, but unmetered does not mean unlimited. In fact unmetered plans often restrict the amount of data you can send-receive because data is transferred at a very low speed.

Conclusion

We hope going through this post you’d have a better idea as how to choose the best dedicated server without compromising on performance. Since, there are plenty of good options available in the market, we recommend to do your own research before purchase. In case, you still have questions or would like to get a professional advice, you can always contact our expert sales team.

25 Oct

The Best Dedicated Hosting Options Under $100/Month

A dedicated server, the topmost hosting tier, is typically reserved for enterprises having large demands for computing power, bandwidth, and storage. As its name implies, entire resources are dedicated to propelling hosted site/application with the maximum performance.

Going for a dedicated environment is indeed a big investment, but it can pay you dividends when you find the host that brings the most value to your purchase.

The phrase, “best dedicated server within the budget of $100/ month” may sound a bit contradictory. But at Softsys Hosting, we always excel to offer “bang for the buck deals” to customers. At this post, we’ll go through configuring a dedicated server and check some preconfigured dedicated server options under $100/month.

Configuring a Dedicated Server

Operating System Choice

Windows operating system is particularly used to host Windows or Microsoft based technologies like ASP.NET, MS SQL, IIS, MS Access, and Visual Basic. Windows servers are shipped with the GUI, so operating system could chew through a lot of computing resources. On the other hand, Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora come with both GUI and core. But ideal server environment should be installed with core OS rather than GUI.

Control Panel

After choosing server hardware, your next big decision would be how you’d like to manage your server. Either you can manage the server through SSH/RDP or you can install control panel. Hosting control panel provides you with the web-based GUI to perform complex tasks within few mouse clicks and to automate processes.

cPanel for Linux machines and Plesk for Windows systems are the best choices. Plesk and cPanel both are very easy to operate. Plesk is cheaper than cPanel and is compatible with multiple OS but mostly paired with Windows systems.

Storage Type

While configuring the server, you can choose between solid state drives (SSD) or a traditional option of hard disk drives (HDD). HDDs feature a spinning platter and a read/write arm that uses magnetism to store the data. SSDs don’t have moving parts and keep information in flash microchips. Because of this characteristics, SSDs are much faster and more expensive.

Support

When you’re going to buy premium hardware, 24/7 technical support is also essential. With the price tag under $100, less likely you’ll get a managed server but you can certainly get a basic managed server.

Note that unmanaged dedicated servers only cover hardware and infrastructure, whereas managed dedicated servers cover server infrastructure, hardware, backup and core elements of the stack.

You can also consider the managed hosting which includes around-the-clock managed support, software configuration, patch installation, update installation and maintaining all aspects of the environment.

Softsys Hosting offers 2 tiers of managed services, unmanaged and fully managed services whereby our experienced technicians manage customer’s server and supply best-effort support for third-party software.

Addons

Along with the hardware/software configurations, you can also choose amongst various addons as per the requirement, like additional IP address, bandwidth, RAM, DDoS protection, daily backups, DDoS protection, RAID, etc.

Softsys Hosting Dedicated Servers

Softsys Hosting offers a basic dedicated setup at $59/month which includes an IP address, Intel Xeon E3-1230 Quad Core, 8GB RAM, DDoS protection, SSD/HDD storage and 1 Gbps connectivity without any setup fees.

You can also have your choice of OS, RAID level, location and control panel makes Softsys Hosting an easy pick for affordable dedicated server configurations. Here are some pre-configured dedicated servers available under $100.

Windows-Based Servers

Configuration #1

» Intel Xeon E3-1230v1/v2/v3 Quad Core w/ HT (8 vCores)

» Location: Chicago, IL – USA/Denver, CO – USA

» RAM: 8GB DDR3 ECC

» HDD 1: 500GB SATA II HDD OR 120GB SSD

» Operating System: Windows Server 2016/2012 R2/ 2008 R2 Std Edition

» MS SQL Server 2016 Express

» Control Panel: MSPControl

» Network Port Speed: 1Gbps Dedicated $0.00 USD

» Bandwidth: 10TB per mon

» IPv4 Addresses: 1

» Service Level: Basic Managed

» DDoS Protection: Automatic Detection / Null Routing

Monthly: $84.00 USD


Configuration #2

»  Intel Xeon E3-1230v1/v2/v3 Quad Core w/ HT (8 vCores)

» Location: Chicago, IL – USA/Denver, CO – USA

» RAM: 16GB DDR3 ECC

» HDD 1: 500GB SATA II HDD OR 120GB SSD

» Operating System: Windows Server 2016/2012 R2/ 2008 R2 Std Edition

» MS SQL Server 2016 Express

» Control Panel: MSPControl

» Network Port Speed: 1Gbps Dedicated $0.00 USD

» Bandwidth: 10TB per mon

» IPv4 Addresses: 1

» Service Level: Basic Managed

» DDoS Protection: Automatic Detection / Null Routing

Monthly: $93.00 USD

 

Linux-Based Servers

Configuration #1

» Intel Xeon E3-1230v1/v2/v3 Quad Core w/ HT (8 vCores)

» Location: Chicago, IL – USA/Denver, CO – USA

» RAM: 8GB DDR3 ECC

» Operating System: CentOS 7.x x64

» Network Port Speed: 1Gbps Dedicated

» Bandwidth: 10TB per mon

» IPv4 Addresses: 1 (Included)

» Service Level: Basic Managed

» DDoS Protection: Automatic Detection / Null Routing

Monthly: $59.00 USD

Configuration #2

» Intel Xeon E3-1230v1/v2/v3 Quad Core w/ HT (8 vCores)

» Location: Chicago, IL – USA/Denver, CO – USA

» RAM: 8GB DDR3 ECC

» HDD 1: 500GB SATA II HDD OR 120GB SSD

» Operating System: CentOS 7.x x64

» Control Panel: cPanel / WHM

» Network Port Speed: 1Gbps Dedicated

» Bandwidth: 10TB per mon

» IPv4 Addresses: 1 (Included)

» Service Level: Basic Managed

» DDoS Protection: Automatic Detection / Null Routing

Monthly: $94.00 USD

 

If you don’t find your choice of configuration, you can contact our sales team to discuss your custom setup. Our solutions architect will work with you to design a tailored environment in accordance with all your needs.

18 Oct

What Control Panel To Choose For Your Dedicated Server?

It’s a great news as your business has grown to the point that you require a dedicated server to host your website. But this will also add additional responsibilities of managing and maintaining your dedicated hosting environment.

Managing a dedicated server without a control panel is difficult. Even to perform the smallest task, you might have to go through a list of steps or a series of shell commands. That’s where control panels come into play to simplify the process of handling servers. Additionally, managing these hosting control panels does not require expert knowledge of server administration.

There are many paid and open source hosting control panels available and you can choose your best as per your need and budget.

Available Control Panels For A Dedicated Server

If you are new to the dedicated server environment then you want a control panel that is user-friendly and intuitive at the same time. With so many control panel options available, choosing one for your dedicated server is little tricky. The best way to make this determination is to know what you are looking to achieve and what a particular control panel has to offer.

In general, control panels are designed for the specific operating systems, which usually distinguished to Windows and Linux.  Some of the most popular options include cPanel, Plesk, and MSControl, all of which are very reliable.

cPanel

Being one of the most feature-rich, powerful and widely used control panels, cPanel/WHM has become the industry standard amongst users and web hosting providers. It comes with both user-interface (cPanel) and admin-interface (WHM), offering intuitive hosting and site management tools to end-users, resellers and dedicated server administrators. A cPanel server includes the WHM login and the cPanel client login for management purposes.

Single cPanel license allows you to host an unlimited number of domains, websites, databases, etc.  which is a quite valuable feature especially if you intend to offer reseller hosting. It has a wide range of plugins to further expand its functionality and it can be integrated with your existing billing software like WHMCS.

Thanks to AutoSSL feature, free SSL certificates are automatically installed and renewed for every domain hosted on the cPanel server. These SSL certificates are absolutely free, provided by Comodo and Let’s Encrypt, and they will be kept renewed as long as you have an active account with your web host. Its EasyApache 4 feature makes managing packages and dependencies simple and super speedy.

cPanel is available as a demo, so you can familiarize yourself with cPanel and WHM before purchasing the license.

Plesk Panel

Plesk is yet another powerful control panel, having 75 to 80 percent share in the European market. Plesk supports various Linux Distributions (CentOS, Ubuntu, CloudLinux, etc)  and Windows OS as well, which is a strong pull factor differentiating Plesk from cPanel. Also, Plesk comes in several editions, each tailored for specific hosting use cases.

It also comes with both user interface and admin features. Like cPanel, Plesk also has a clean and user-friendly interface. Plesk is also used by some of the big hosting companies.

Unlike other control panels, Plesk offers support for Git through its Gitman extension, so you can track changes and site updates. Plesk’s Docker Integration feature allows you to launch Docker images straight from Plesk without touching the command line.

SSL certificate installation has always been a pain to set up and renew. Plesk is integrated with the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority, which allows you to install the SSL certificates on your site within a single click. Plesk is available for both Windows and Linux dedicated servers, so make sure you get the appropriate version for your server.

MSPControl

MSPControl is a hosting control panel for Windows systems to automate the provisioning of a full suite of hosted services on Windows servers. MSPControl gives users simple multi-tenant point-and-click control over Windows Server applications including Microsoft IIS, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft RemoteApp, Skype for Business, Microsoft Online Services and Hyper-V R2 Deployments.

MSPControl comes with 3 licensing schemes, Free, Basic and Standard license. A free license is sufficient for all kind of non-production environments like a demo, lab, test etc. The basic license is good enough to run small web hosting company. Standard license suits mid-sized hosting and managed hosting providers.

Conclusion

When you host your site on a dedicated server, you should be prepared for the different level of complexity because you are only responsible to ensure that your site stays online. The control panel will enable you to create the best site possible by putting the administrative power and flexibility in your hands. Programs such as cPanel and Plesk are very popular and extremely easy to use for Linux systems. While MSPControl is a viable option for Windows systems.

20 Sep

Some Software Choices You Inevitably Need To Be Installed On Your Dedicated Server

Most web hosting providers deliver a dedicated server with just OS installed and a few bare minimum components. Right after receiving server logins, you’d need some important software on your server to make it more secure and easy to manage. In this post, we have compiled a list of software that will help you with easy server management and better security.

Software For Windows Dedicated Server

The software choice for Windows systems mainly depends on the fact how you are going to utilize your server. Let’s say, you are going to use it as an ASP.NET development machine, you’ll need the complete Visual Studio suite installed then.

Similarly, to host a Radio server or Forex trading platform, you are required to install respective software on the server. In such a way, we’ll discuss some generic software every Windows server must be installed with.

Web Control Panel

Unless you hold the years of experience with Windows systems, it’s a bit difficult to manage Windows servers through remote desktop connection. That’s where control panel comes into play.

A hosting control panel gives you web-based GUI which helps you manage all web services under single login very efficiently and quickly. It also allows you to manage websites, domains, SQL databases, DNS records, email accounts, FTP accounts, file functions, disk space availability, bandwidth usage, and lot more.

WebsitePanel, SolidCP, and MSPControl are the most popular free control panels. If you’d like to have some paid alternative, you can go with the Plesk panel.

Microsoft Web Platform Installer

Unlike Linux systems, Windows server requires a lots of individual components to build a functional web server. Having said that, you are required to go to individual websites, find the compatible dedicated server software version and install it manually. This sounds a little bit tedious and takes hours to complete. To get rid of this, you should install Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) even before you run Windows updates.

It’s a tiny tool that fetches the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework, PHP, MySQL Server and lot more. It can also install the most popular free scripts for blogging, and content management system (CMS) within a few clicks.

Software Firewall

To ensure your dedicated server is protected against online threats and malicious traffic, a solid firewall is a must have thing. As we know that Windows systems also come with an effective built-in firewall that adds a layer of protection to your server. This default firewall is powerful enough and works quite well for most of the servers.

In case you’d like to make your server more secure than you can consider personal software firewall. ZoneAlarm Free Firewall and Comodo Free Firewall are both excellent free alternatives you can think of.

Antivirus & Anti-Malware Software

Malware is no imaginary problem, especially for the Windows servers. Hundreds of new virus definitions are spread daily across Internet and antivirus labs have to detect them and find solutions.

Having RDP access for the dedicated server, if you or one of your colleagues visit a phishing website or download uncertain files by mistake, your dedicated hosting platform may infected by dangerous malware.

Even some viruses are distributed through emails, freeware tools, and pop-up messages. As such malicious software can completely damage your dedicated server functionality, compromise security or erase sensitive data.

So, it is essential to have a good antivirus software to detect & remove viruses before they harm your system. Antivirus software detects suspicious websites and files that contain malicious programs before they enter your server and blocks malicious scripts from being downloaded.

ClamWin is an excellent free antivirus program supporting most of the Windows desktop and server OS. There are also plenty of paid alternatives available on the market so you can choose according to your requirements and budget.

Remote Desktop Guard

RDP (Remote Desktop) allows users to connect to a remote server from anywhere. Indeed RDP is a very useful feature however, it also has several security issues. When a malicious user launches the network/port scanners or RDP brute-force attacks on Windows servers, thousands of failed login attempts are generated and pages of events are being logged. Such attacks abuse your dedicated server resources (CPU, RAM, Disk Space and Network Bandwidth) and degrade the overall functionality of the server.

To prevent them, host-based intrusion prevention system (HIPS) like RdpGuard is implemented.  This protects servers from brute-force attacks on various protocols and services (RDP, FTP, SMTP, MySQL, MS-SQL, IIS Web Login, etc). It monitors the audit logs and detects failed login attempts. If the number of failed login attempts from a single IP address exceeds the normal limit, the IP address will be blocked immediately.

Conclusion

Above listed dedicated hosting programs are currently configured on our own servers and so far so good for the production usage as well. Of course, you may also need some other specific tools based your requirements, so you may subscribe to our managed dedicated server plans directly for guaranteed security and support.