In simple terms, Bandwidth is the transfer of information from A to B, and the more complex your website is (the more pages and information), the more there is to be downloaded, and so you’ll need to make sure you have enough bandwidth for your website and the visitors accessing your website’s information.

If you opt for an entry level package, then you may find need to go for premium if your website expands and attracts a larger audience, so it’s not always best to go for the cheapest option. This is why you should really research into various service providers, looking for the best deal for you and your business.

Visitors need a pleasurable experience on your website if they are to return, so make sure you choose a package that cna handle the number of visitors and the information on the website.

When choosing your hosting package you have to consider if you want to opt for dedicated hosting or shared hosting there are pros and cons for both. With all types of hosting you will pay the hosting company for a certain amount of space on one of their servers. The main difference is that on a shared server there will be other people’s websites hosted on there along with yours where as dedicated servers allow you to host just your site or sites. Below are a few points to consider about each option before making your decision.

Shared hosting is ultimately cheaper but can mean that actions other people take could potentially affect your site. If for example they send out a lot of spam emails or carry out bad SEO practices, it could mean your server IP gets blocked causing your website to go offline or emails be blocked. Most hosting companies are pretty hot on this and will remove any domains from their servers that are seen to be doing this.

Dedicated allows you much more control over the server settings and security. You will have access to the whole of the server and it is your choice as to how many sites you host on there. This is more expensive but is seen as more reliable and secure.

Technology has advanced to the new levels in recent years. With this evolution in technology, more and more people are taking a liking towards writing codes and in creating some very wonderful things with its help. For a person who has been a passive coder throughout his career, now is the time to learn new codes and programming techniques. In addition to helping developers to think critically, this is lucrative and intellectually appealing to the people as well. Keeping that in mind, here is an overview of top five website programming languages you should learn this year.

1.Java

Since many years, Java is one of the high-level and complex programming languages. The proficiency in Java helps developers to create online games and to build creative interactive applications. Security offices, banks and other high-risk organisations utilise Java to protect and operate their systems. Even after 20 years, the demand for Java developers and engineers is huge and the salary they command is above average. No wonder that it is regarded as one of the best web programming languages that developers need to learn.

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Web hosting is basically the space needed for your website to reside on. There are many types of hosting available from shared (Renting a space on a server shared by others), Dedicated (Renting a server purely for your own website/websites) to Cloud hosting (Renting a space on a virtual server). With all of these types of hosting, security should always be a top priority. If your website or customer’s websites are hacked, then this could cause a number of issues. Not only may the site go down or be filled with spammy advertising, but you may also find that secure information such as customer’s records or card details are compromised. This can not only have an immediate devastating effect but can affect a business long term, as you may find you lose the trust of many of your visitors. Talk to the hosting company about what security features they have in place and what the process is if there has indeed been a compromise.

When choosing which hosting company to use to host your website, cheapest is not necessarily the best option. You do not want to go to the expensive of having a website created and possibly even and online shop to find that the site goes offline every few days and also takes your email down with it. There are many hosting companies out there offering a wide range of packages.

Often the company that creates your website for you will host the site as well, but it is worth finding out who they use and what kind of up time and support they offer. Some companies will let you host your site elsewhere but this should really be discussed with them upfront. Websites and online trading can be a huge part of many businesses and the losses incurred if the site is offline for a few days can not only affect those days sales but also future business as many visitors will not return to a site if they have experienced problems with it the first time they used it.

Both dynamic and static website design have their merits and demerits; with dynamic offering a more interactive experience for its visitors, and static websites being easy to manage and maintain. But before going in to that, we should look at what people mean by dynamic and static web design:

Dynamic design: This is a type of web design which allows the website manager to modify the content, products, and structure of the website through a content management system (CMS), also known as a web admin. Various types of websites you will be familiar with use a dynamic design, like blogs and e-commerce website. This is because having a system which can be easily modified is necessary for managing products, and for operating a customer relationship management system (CRM). The value of these things are clear; it allows your customers the freedom to decide how to buy your products, whether they want to phone you so they can be talked through their options, or if they just want to browse your website and choose what they feel is right for them.

Static design: Unlike a dynamic design, you can’t really adjust any page on the website very easily; it is all changed through an FTP client (file transfer protocol). This comes with a certain amount of risk; you can quite easily break a website if you don’t know what you’re doing, so leaving it to a professional (or at least somebody with some training) is advised. It does, however, offer its own advantages; you don’t need to do much on-site management, which lots of people tend to try to avoid (hence why this type of website is popular). While this type of website is certainly more limited than a dynamic website, and offers far less freedom for the web manager, it can still be an effective tool for your business. Having a website is essential for a business to succeed in the modern era, but that doesn’t mean that you need to offer products online – you can still succeed with your website by using it solely as a place to direct customers to contact information, so they can choose whether to phone or email you. For some business models, being able to sell products online isn’t a realistic proposition, so this can still give you the opportunity to gain some of the advantages offered by the internet.

OpenStack has made its 7th release, called Grizzly, which includes updates that touch on user experience, compute, storage and networking

OpenStack announced on Thursday that it has made its 7th release, called Grizzly, which includes updates that touch on user experience, compute, storage and networking.

According to a blog post by Mark Collier, this release, more than any before it, was driven by users who have been running OpenStack in production for the past year or more. The number of contributors has increased by 56 percent from the last release, Folsom.

The compute side adds new capabilities for those operating at massive scale, including “Cells” to manage distributed clusters and “NoDB” to reduce reliance on central databases. Grizzly also adds full support for ESX, KVM, XEN and Hyper-V hypervisors. Prior to Grizzly, OpenStack was largely focused on KVM and XEN, according to a report by GigaOM.

Grizzly includes cross-origin resource sharing to enable browsers to “talk” directly to backend storage environments, and on the block storage side, 10 new drivers were added including Ceph/RBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat/Gluster, SolidFire and Zadara,

OpenStack Grizzly has an intelligent scheduler for allocating the right class of storage for each workload, such as for performance, cost or efficiency.

According to a recent study on Ceph, OpenStack is the dominant cloud stack used by the majority of Ceph deployments.

On the networking side, there was a focus on achieving greater scale and higher availability by distributing L3/L4 and DHCP services across multiple servers. Grizzly features a new load-balancing-as-a-service framework and API. There are new plugins from Big Switch, Hyper-V, PlumGrid, Brocade and Midonet in addition to support for Open vSwitch, Cisco UCS/Nexus, Linux Bridge, Nicira, Ryu OpenFlow and NEC OpenFlow.

A report by InformationWeek says the features around software defined networking are the key area of development in this release. 

“By implementing software defined networking in OpenStack, the project’s leaders are on the one hand charging forward into territory on which established network vendors, such as Cisco and Juniper, have approached carefully. If OpenStack succeeds in making virtualized networks both flexible and manageable, it will have made a major argument for itself as a future architecture inside the enterprise data center as well as among service providers, such as Rackspace and HP.”

Talk back: What do you think of the features introduced in OpenStack Grizzly Is there anything you hope to see in future releases of OpenStack Let us know in a comment.

Amazon Web Services has reduced pricing for running Windows on its cloud, while Google has lowered the pricing of its Compute Engine services.

In what continues to be a competitive public cloud hosting and infrastructure landscape, Amazon Web Services has reduced pricing for running Windows on its cloud, while Google has lowered the pricing of its Compute Engine services.

The two cloud giants continue to go head to head with one another as well as with private and hybrid cloud rivals.

The move comes a month after Amazon Web Services lowered the price of its new E2 Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server by up to 27 percent.

Google also announced increased the number of virtual servers users can select from, as well as and making its cloud services easier to use for European users.

Though the two public cloud service vendors are continually improving their respective services, pricing will remain the deciding factor that convince companies to move their on premises servers.

Amazon continues to ramp up the selection of Windows-based server products customers can host on its infrastructure, as well as lowering the cost of its Windows on-demand EC2 instances by up to 26 percent.

Amazon also recently lowered the cost of its Simple Storage Service.

Google has also lowered the price of its infrastructure as a service product, Compute Engine, by 4 percent. The IaaS offering, which enables users to run Linux Virtual Machines, now offers instances from $0.132 per hour in the U.S., which is slightly more than Amazon’s EC2 standard on-demand medium instance type which is priced from $0.120 per hour.

In addition to the price reduction, Google is also opening its Compute Engine platform to all companies who sign up for its Gold Support package, a value of $400 per month.

Finally, Google has added new instance types, improved the management console and the ability to run virtual servers in Europe.

Talk back: Will you be taking advantage of either Amazon Web Services or Google’s lower cloud pricing Do you think this latest price reduction will push Amazon Web Services or Google forward as a cloud market leader Let us know in a comment.

Dynastack Cloud Desktops allows users to provision virtual desktops and workstations complete with profiles, roles, security, applications and storage

Cloud services provider Dynastack announced on Thursday the first release of its Cloud Desktops product and the planned release of its Hybrid Cloud Desktop solution powered by OpenStack.

Though cost has hampered market penetration of virtual desktop infrastructure, Dynastack says it sees more enterprises adopting VDI with thin client and bring your own device architectures as well as moving to desktop as a service offerings. A study by Visiongain last year estimated that the global cloud-based VDI market would reach $11.2 billion in 2012.

Those findings are contrary to a more recent Forrester Research study which found that less than 10 percent of IT decision makers in North America and Europe plan to implement virtual desktop infrastructure deployments.

Dynastack Cloud Desktops allows users to provision virtual desktops and workstations complete with profiles, roles, security, applications and storage one time and then deploy that instance to dozens or hundreds of users in a matter of minutes, according to the press release.

Dynastack says that it has found the primary complaint among current adopters of VDI and DaaS technology is the high latency of the remote display. Since 2011, Dynastack has been working on several solutions to the issue and will launch its Hybrid Cloud Desktop solution in the coming months to address these needs.

“VDI represents an intriguing prospect that hasn’t really reached fruition in terms of enterprise rollout,” Dynastack CEO Jared Rice said in a statement. “I suspect that is largely due to the inherent video latency issues with traditional VDI offerings and the underlying costs to address it. Our Hybrid Cloud Desktops solve the problem by using local resources primarily and then burst to the cloud when more resources are needed all while continually backing up both instances. Hybrid gives mobile workers the flexibility enterprises are looking for, while at the same time creating the ultimate BYOD. Since everything is really in the cloud ecosystem, it’s as secure as you want it to be.”

Cloud Desktops from Dynastack have the option to run Windows, Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and ChromiumOS with utility pricing similar to standard server pricing. Dynastack says its primary goal is to continue developing its cloud ecosystem along with its Hybrid Cloud Desktops in order to bring the price point down to a friendly consumer level.

Dynastack offers Cloud Desktops in its private and public cloud ecosystems as well as offering it as an enterprise public or private VDI solution. The formal launch is scheduled for next week on April 8, though it is offering advance accounts for select users. Details are sparse on pricing and packages as the Dynastack website is still not fully functional.

Last year, enterprise OpenStack company Piston Cloud partnered with Gridcentric to launch the first virtual desktop infrastructure for OpenStack.

Talk back: Have you looked at offering a desktop as a service or virtual desktop solution What do you think of Dynastack’s perspective on challenges with current VDI offerings Let us know in a comment.

In the week ending April 5, 2013, GreenGeeks is offering the first month of its reseller hosting service for 1 cent

In the week ending April 5, 2013, GreenGeeks is offering the first month of its reseller hosting service for 1 cent, Action Web Group is offering 10 percent off all its web hosting packages, Net Depot is offering 24 percent off its Intel servers, and UK2 is offering £200 off selected dedicated servers.

GreenGeeks Offers One Month of Hosting for 1 Cent

Web hosting provider GreenGeeks is offering the first month of its reseller hosting service for only 1 cent.

The promotion applies to all reseller hosting plans from the smallest Seed plan to Forest plan.

The seed plan enables customers to host up to 10 clients on unlimited disk space and bandwidth, while the Forest plan allows resellers up to 250 clients on unlimited space and bandwidth.

Action Web Group Offers 10 Percent Off Web Hosting Plans

For its April promotion, Action Web Group is offering 10 percent discount on all three web hosting packages, including Starter, Advanced and Jackpot.

The discounted price applies when customers sign up for a monthly or annual contract.

To redeem this discount, customers must enter the promo code “apr2013″ at checkout.

Net Depot Offers 25 Percent Off Intel Servers

From now until April 30th, Net Depot is offering the latest Intel servers at a 24 percent discount.

NetDepot’s servers include free cPanel server migration,full IPMI access, KVM over IP, remote reboot, remote OS reload, hot swap hard drives, 24-hour customer support, free GNAX AppMonitor for server and application level performance management, access to high performance SAN, redundant storage, and fully managed options.

UK2 Offers £200 Off Selected Dedicated Servers

UK web hosting provider UK2 is offering a £200 discount on selected servers. All UK2 servers include 100TB of bandwidth, gigabit ports, 24-hour support, a redundant network infrastructure and up to 32GB DDR3.

To redeem the £200 discount, customers must enter the coupon code “200OFF” in the checkout.

The offer applies to annual contracts for UK2′s UKG800, UKG1600 and UKG3200 servers.