BuyHTTP Corporate Blog

We are now putting all new accounts on state-of-the-art Dual Xeon Clovertown servers. This gives the server 8 physical processing cores giving your site the most power possible.

If you want to get on the new servers you can place your order here.

On a somewhat regular basis we are asked what the difference is between a semi dedicated server and a VPS, and why we’ve chosen to offer semi dedicated hosting. Before offering any new product or service we tend to spend countless hours researching the various options available, and little else seems to spark as much debate as semi dedicated vs. VPS. In the end, we found our decision to offer semi dedicated servers to be a very easy one to make.

While each option has it’s pros and cons (which we will go over shortly) the few pros of VPS are far outweighed by the cons.

Semi Dedicated Pros:

• Very few sites per server allow for quick loading, even with resource intensive sites
• Fewer sites on the server means fewer chances for downtime due to hacked sites
• Every site has full access to all server resources as needed
• Same ease-of-use as shared hosting

Semi Dedicated Cons:

• No customization of core applications (PHP/mySQL/etc.)
• No “guaranteed” resources

VPS Pros:

• Full root access to your part of the server
• Ability to have custom core applications (PHP/mySQL/etc.)
• “Guaranteed” resources (more detail below)

VPS Cons:

• Responsibility to keep all server software up to date
• Many sites on each server, similar to normal shared hosting
• Access to only a portion of the server’s resources
• Price (more detail below)

One of the biggest factors for us was the pricing of each. With a semi dedicated server the costs involved are: the server, bandwidth, one control panel license, and admin costs of maintenance. VPSs carry all those costs plus: a control panel license for each VPS on the server, a separate control panel to manage the VPSs, and admin costs to maintain each VPS (each VPS is a separate “server” and needs to be maintained as such).

On a normal semi dedicated server we have 5-10 sites. So let’s say we are putting together a server to have 10 separate VPSs on the same server. A normal control panel license comes in around $30. Management time comes in around 5-10 hours per month. VPS control panels can cost $100+/month. Just on those 3 factors you’re spending an additional $370/month and 45-90 hours of admin time providing VPSs.

The other major drawback is the resources offered with a VPS. An average entry level VPS comes with 128MB of guaranteed RAM. The problem is the most common control panel (cPanel) suggests a minimum of 256MB RAM, just to run cPanel. So if you have a VPS with 128MB RAM, you will be running from SWAP all of the time and your loading times will be horrible. Even with 512MB RAM cPanel tends to be a little laggy. Let’s assume you go with a VPS with 512MB RAM and a high powered server will have around 4GB RAM for all accounts, that’s only 8 VPSs they can fit on the server. Or is it? The beauty is, you can “guarantee” more RAM/CPU than you have available on the server.

With semi dedicated hosting, users are able to run their sites without any worries about keeping the server up to date as it works exactly like shared hosting… You just get a lot more resources. And full access to everything the server has to offer.

You can find more info on our semi dedicated hosting here.

BuyHTTP is now offering free TemplatePlazza.com templates with select hosting plans. TemplatePlazza offers a large number of nicely unique templates that will help you have a professional looking site online in minutes. These templates are designed for use with Joomla, but can also work with Mambo.

There is a very interesting article over at Information Week reporting that 94% of all email traffic in the month of December was SPAM. With the holiday shopping season around, I guess it’s really no surprise.

We have created a new Firefox toolbar to help you navigate BuyHTTP and our system. The toolbar features one-click access to the Account Manager, Affiliate system and more. Click the button to install the toolbar.

WordPress has also released version 2.1. There are over 500 bugfixes available, so it is highly recommended to upgrade. You can download the release here.

We’ve been using the datacenter that used to host buyhttp.com for new semi dedicated hosting accounts so we had to move to a new datacenter. Along with this move we will be changing some URLs.

To start with we’ve moved the flash tutorials to http://tutorials.buyhttp.com

We at BuyHTTP would like to wish everyone a happy 2007 and start the year with a new tip for your Joomla or Mambo site.

When uninstalling components it’s not at all unusual for them to leave their database tables behind. Many do this to help with upgrading, making it a simple uninstall/reinstall situation. But if you are completely uninstalling a component, make sure to check the database using phpMyAdmin as see if the tables have been removed as well.

Have to thank friesengeist of the Joomla core team for this very nice tip for your Joomla or Mambo site.

There has been a lot of discussion lately on further securing your Joomla or Mambo installations and what can be done. We do everything possible at the server level but there are a few things that can done in your individual site to help ensure a hackless Joomla or Mambo existence.

This tip explains how to move your configuration.php file outside of your webroot as well as making it unwritable by the server. That makes it nearly impossible for someone to corrupt or gain access to the information in the file.

Read more »

In the world of dynamic sites there is often a lot of worry about duplicate content penalties since so many different URLs can point to the same exact page. We have good news to help quell those worries.

At the recent SES (Search Engine Strategies) in Chicago, Vanessa Fox of Google stated in an interview with WebProNews that there really are no duplicate content penalties for pages within your site. She even went as far as to specifically address dynamic sites and their content.

It is an extremely informative interview and great insight into some Google processes. She also goes over Google Sitemaps and how they can help your site get spidered faster.

To view the interview in it’s entirety visit  http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/

Search engines like Google see http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com as two completely different sites and that can lead to duplicate content penalties and lower rankings. What can be done to correct this issue? Amazingly it is just a few lines of code in your .htaccess file.

On BuyHTTP.com we use the following code:

RewriteEngine On
## SEO REWRITE
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.buyhttp\.com
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.buyhttp.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Let’s go through that line-by-line to examine what’s happening.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.buyhttp\.com

This line says if the host URL doesn’t start with www.buyhttp.com execute the following code. It is important to have the \ before each .

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$

This line says if the request isn’t made on port 443 (used for SSL or https://) execute the following code

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.buyhttp.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is the meat of the rule. It tells the server to take all of the URL after the .com/ and put it after http://www.buyhttp.com and do it as a 301 (permanently moved) redirect.

The overall rules state that if a request comes in without the www. and it’s not over a secure connection rewrite it to contain the www.

If you are adding this to an existing .htaccess file for a system like Mambo or Joomla with SEF URLs the placement is very important. It must be after RewriteEngine On in your existing file and before the core SEF rewrite rules. You will also want to make sure you only have one instance of RewriteEngine On in the file.

Taking a few minutes to implement these few lines of code will not only help with your search engine rankings but will also result in uniform URLs throughout your site.