TotalChoice Hosting Blog

In an effort to improve our support services, we have brought back the Manager Notification feature to our help desk. This means if you have a problem that has not been resolved to your satisfaction, then you can escalate it to a manager.

This feature is available for every ticket submitted to our help desk and becomes active once a member of our support team responds to a ticket. Once activated, you will then be presented with a link at the bottom of that ticket stating, “Not satisfied with the support you are receiving? Click here to notify a Manager of your issue.”

This link can be accessed whether you a viewing a ticket from within the help desk or the support section of your billing account. Furthermore, each e-mail reply sent from the help desk will also contain a link to access the Manager Notification feature.

Clicking the link will take you to a short form that when submitted will trigger the following actions:

• your comment/request is noted in the ticket
• the ticket is marked urgent and forwarded to management
• a page is sent out to all managers on duty
• a manager will review your ticket and respond with a resolution

We hope you never need this service, but if you do we are here and will do everything within our power to correct any issues you are facing.

I had no idea that we had a local Nascar team. Maybe TCH should sponsor a Nascar team!

While shopping at my local Petco store, I saw this car in the parking lot.

A total new use of Duct Tape!

We at TotalChoice have always made it a point to reduce the response time for issues brought to our attention. But there are a few things that you as a client can do to get your issues rectified in a zap. Here are some quick tricks and tips.

Support.

Among the various means to get in touch with us — Helpdesk, IMs, Live Chat, IRC, I would recommend the help desk as the primary. Why ?

1) It is a secure link and you will have peace of mind that your sensitive information never gets compromised. Help desk is accessible only to  TCH employees currently under contract unlike IM, IRC etc.

2) It allows you to enter critical information like Cpanel logins, servername so that we can search and access your account quickly rather than emailing back and forth requesting more info.

3) This info proves the ownership of the account so that we know the request is coming from a legitimate source.

4) Allows all techs, management and of course yourself to track the progress. You can always quote the ticket id via chat or IM to any of the techs at a later stage.

5) Finally the most significant factor, you do not have to tag along or wait online for the tech to check and reply. Just submit the ticket, get a cup of coffee, watch a couple of commercials, get the garbage out etc etc. By the time you are done, we would have responded back to you.

Now, information is a vital part of getting your issue resolved. Most of the time we get tickets like “My email is not working. Please check”. Some of the things that would be running on the tech’s mind would be :

# Is it for a single email account or for the entire domain ?
# Incoming / outgoing or both ?
# Is the issue on webmail (horde, squirrelmail etc) or on email clients like outlook, thunderbird etc.
# Any error messages ?

So include as much information as possible, and steps to replicate the issue including the logins so that we can get into it straight away. The more information you give, more easier for us to identify and correct the problem.

Contact Address

Ensure that you set a valid, working email as the contact id on billing, domain registration and as cpanel contact address. This should ideally be something that is not connected to the domain or the server hosting the account so that you would receive the email even if the server is down or (…ahem…) if the account gets suspended. You can use any of the free providers like Gmail, Yahoo! etc.

The same holds true while submitting tickets, there is no point in submitting one by setting the contact email to a domain / email account that is not working. But of course, you know that already… silly me

TCH Forums

Our forum — http://totalchoicehosting.com/forums/ — provides a vast array of knicks and knacks which can be used effectively to manage your account. All issues, updates etc pertainting to your server and TCH operations will be reported there. Migrations, upgrades etc are posted well in advance to minimize client issues. All you need to do is sign up and subscribe to the thread designated for your server and any other threads that you feel is needed like General Announcements, Network Maintenance etc so that the alerts reaches you via email.
You can also find members there who are willing to help you out with third party applications, tweaking your site and so on.

HAPPY HOSTING !!

Nowadays, there are many discussions about Linux and Windows web hosting options Today, I would like to go through the very basic things to be considered when choosing your hosting.  The very first consideration to be given are the features that would be available to you for your websites. Other considerations may that may be are cost, ease and convenience. Those aspects, which concern your websites, are the same operating system considerations to be born in mind when selecting your new service.

The vast majority of hosting services being offered today are based either on Linux or Windows. There are a few other Unix variants used in hosting companies, but for the most part the features offered to the guest website are so similar that they can be thought of as the same. For the purposes of this discussion, “Unix” systems will be lumped together and a Linux model will be considered. There may also be hosting services based on another operating system altogether, but these are few and far between. For those systems, you would have to compare their feature sets to those discussed here.

Second to the operating system, the most important influence on the features that will be available to you will be the Web Server system in use. On Linux systems, the Web Server offered is almost always the Apache server. On Windows it’s the Internet Information Server [Service], IIS. Apache is also available for Windows systems, but is not very frequently used by hosting companies using the Windows platform. Again, there are other Web Servers in use but the great majority of hosting companies use one of these two.

Linux Hosting Overview:
Nowadays most of the web designers are choosing Linux servers to host their websites. Everyday Windows is losing costumers to Linux hosting and web hosts are exploring this fact and are offering daily new promotions and Linux plans. And why are the web designers choosing Linux plans? First a short and very important advantage: the price, the web host companies usually use free editions of Linux systems like Linux Red Hat, Linux Fedora Core or even FreeBSD operating system, this fact lowers the final price for the costumer because the web hosts don’t have to pay for the server operating system. All the Linux operating systems are under the GNU license, this means that anyone can access the source code and modify it, very important to optimize the server and resolve any problem or security issue. Linux systems are the most flexible and stable servers. It’s easier to upgrade and expand a Linux Server. By default these servers are installed in text mode, the system uses fewer resources and dedicates all its power to the Web Pages hosted and not some fancy GUI with all these really neat bells and whistles that do nothing to boost the end user with sites hosted on the server.  Linux supports Perl, CGI-BIN, PHP, Shells, MySQL, PostgresSQL, MS FrontPage extensions and much more.

Windows Hosting Overview:
Everyone knows Windows! Hard to believe but it’s true that Windows is losing ground to Linux hosting. It is true that Windows is more expensive than a Linux hosting plan but Windows is still Windows!! On the flip side Widnows can support some tools that Linux cannot run. Only Windows plans support Scripting languages for dynamic content such as Active Server Pages (ASP) and ASP.NET, Active Perl and Visual C++. Only Windows hosting will run Microsoft specific applications such as MS SQL databases, MS Access Databases and IIS. This is very important and if you’re planning to use any of those languages or applications in you website, you will need to consider your options.

Analysing Your Webhosting Needs:
Linux hosting accounts are currently the most popular alternatives for anyone wishing to start a website or a blog. Nearly all internet hosting companies offer Linux hosted solutions with prices varying considerably depending on the host, server hardware and the specifications offered by each individual package. Most affordable solutions cost only a few dollars per month and these offer all the requirements anyone wanting to start a small or medium sized website will need. For more complex and feature rich options, a dedicated Linux server is definetly the best alternative.

If you don’t know whether Linux hosting is the right option for you there are a few pointers that could help in the assessment process. Many popular scripts are developed specifically or work better on Linux servers. Examples of such scripts include Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, OsCommerce and phpBB to mention only a few. These scripts are mostly developed using the PHP scripting language with MySQL database, which performs exceptionally better on Linux servers and thus explaining why most people will prefer to use Linux based hosting services.

Windows hosting solutions provide basically the same functions as their Linux counterpart except when utilizing ASP and ASP.Net that is exclusively native to Windows. Another aspect worth mentioning about Windows servers is that they are the only alternative that can run the Visual Basic and the VB Scripting language. In reality both alternatives work exceptionally well when used in distinct ways, making it very hard to determine which alternative is superior to the other, even if such a comparison is possible. When uncertain on which solution to opt for, the best practice is to research the requirements needed to host the site and only purchase the hosting account when all the details have been gathered.

Which is Better – Windows or Linux Hosting? A Comparison:
Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains shown below

Source: Netcraft. Visit netcraft.com for more information.

Performance:
In low-stress conditions Windows and Linux servers have very similar performances but under high load Linux is believed to be superior to Windows.

Reliability:
The general consensus is that Linux is more reliable. It is believed that Linux servers have less downtime. Microsoft’s Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 (now even Windows 2007) are much more stable and reliable than previous versions, but there are still cases where a server will require a reboot to resolve an issue.

Functionality:
This is where these two platforms differ the most. There isn’t much that can be achieved using one platform that can’t be done on the other one. The main difference are the underlying technologies. For example, if you need a database driven website, you can choose either PHP/MySQL combination under Linux or ASP/MS SQL combination under Windows 2000.Security:

Out of the box, neither Linux or Windows is very secure for Internet use. A web server has to be constantly managed and security patches need to be applied to keep a server secure. But the known threats to Windows machines are much more than for Linux servers.

Price:
Linux holds an edge due to the fact that the most of the software we use is open source (free) and that it’s easier to maintain Linux servers than Windows servers for the same level of reliability and performance. In upcoming economies like India, China, Argentina, Brazil etc, price is a big issue and the low cost Linux servers are in big demand. Unless you genuinely plan to use Windows platform specific features, it probably makes sense to choose the Linux platform.

Summary:
I would say, the right question isn’t “Which one is the best – Windows or Linux?” but “Which web hosting is the right choice for your needs?” Both have their pros and cons. Whether Linux web hosting or Windows web hosting is good for you, depends entirely on your hosting needs! Nearly 99% of anything you can dream of can be done on a Linux Server!

Every one has heard it or read it somewhere. Maybe your friend at work told you about his new hosting plan that gives him unlimited transfer or disk space. My own mother told me the other day that her new email account on her ISP gave her unlimited email space. Well, as you can imagine I was taken back by my own mother falling for the biggest lie ever to be perpetrated on the hosting clients of the world.

The main elements of hosting lately appear only to revolve around how much space and bandwidth is your provider providing. How insane is this?

It really boils down to a few simple truths. The network lines that carry data around the web (optic fiber, cable, copper wire etc) have a finite capacity. There is a limit to the amount of data that can be transferred at any point in time. Likewise, the hard drive of a web server has a limited amount of space determined by the physical size of the hard drive.

So how can companies offer such unlimited plans.  They are tricksters.  Truth be told, read the fine print.  These companies limit the amount of upload time, CPU Cycle Usage, place limits on INODE Usage, and so on and so on.

Now when you read our policies you will find none of these limits.  We do not limit your CPU cycles, or your the amount of files you can store, or limit your FTP sessions to 5 minutes.

My father always told me, some things in life are not what they appear to be.

A few good articles on Unlimited myths can be found here:

http://www.findmyhosting.com/truthunlimited.htm