Platform as a Service

This model provides the client with a computing platform including operating system and access to some software tools. The client gets a certain amount of work to do (modeling, debugging, or whatever they like to do), and is free to send the results back to their server or anywhere else they want to send. The client gets everything else in the software stack.

In a platform as a service model, the server has an equivalent computing resource on their side of the application as well. In this case, the client doesn’t have to transfer a work item to the server for the server to process it. Instead, the client could just send the work item to the server directly, and it would be processed immediately.

In short, with a platform as a service model, a client would be able to do all of their processing (any processing they want to do) directly from their platform.

High level overview

Let’s consider the advantages and disadvantages of this model for modelling, debugging and debugging.

Advantages

These advantages of this model depend on the details of the platform used. The benefit of platform as a service is that it allows a developer to do any processing directly on the client side, and the server can help them do that processing in order to complete the logic they want to work with. It also means that if a developer needs to send multiple work items from their platform, and the first one gets sent but the second one takes longer than expected, the client doesn’t need to transfer anything from their platform back to the server. Instead, the server can just send the completed work item.

Disadvantages

This model has some downsides. The downsides vary according to the implementation, but here are a few of the issues:

Limitations on input type validation, like an ID number, as in our example of validating some data in a service model. You could have some error checking in your platform, and the client could register a validator, but it’s difficult to find a validator that will actually work. In general, the developers would like the ability to check things from other platforms, as well.

With this model, you have to be careful to balance processing with input validation and validation of errors. If you don’t have proper validation of inputs, then your platform can be easily manipulated by someone on your team (or by someone with access to your server). The reason is that input validation can be done directly on your platform, and errors can be instantly added to a work item from your platform to the server. The other side of the equation is that there can be issues with data validation. If a piece of data is valid in your platform, and it’s verified to be valid in a different platform, then the validity of the work item won’t be guaranteed to be correct. So, the developer needs to perform the validation, and then take steps to verify the output of the validation. This can be a huge impediment to the debugging process.

One of the things I like about this model is the ability to send work items directly to the server. There are many situations where it would be handy to do that, and the server allows it. So, for example, if you needed to send a lot of code from a platform to another platform, then it could do that for you. One thing you can’t do is send a work item directly to another platform, and have it back in a format that works for both platforms. You have to make sure that the right data is sent, that the input validation is in place, that the validation codes are formatted correctly (like creating input, validating the input, copying the validation code into the input, and formatting the output) and so on.

Now that I’ve said that, I realize that it would be easy to send all of the code to the server and have it back to the client as a platform-specific application. That wouldn’t really make much sense, however. The problem with doing that is that the server may be going through a background task to generate something else for you (or maybe it’s telling the client that something else is happening on the server), and if you just have the client generate a new work item and send it directly to the server, then you won’t have proper validation. On the other hand, if the client makes its own platform-specific application and sends it directly to the server, then you would have very important validation validation that’s happening at the server level.

What do you think about this approach? Do you have any ideas or suggestions about improving this model? How would it be improved for you?

How to Choose a Web Hosting Provider?

Selecting a web hosting provider that will suit your requirements is a daunting task. There are many aspects you need to consider before investing in the web hosting provider of your choice. Before making a decision, first, understand your business and what you need from a web hosting provider.

Web Hosting Providers

Web Hosting Providers are the core of your online website. They are the infrastructure and communication network between your website and your customers.

If you have a server located on one of their servers, you will have the ability to log in and access all of your customers. You will have the ability to add information to your customers from their contact details. This is one of the key considerations you should consider when selecting a web hosting provider for your online business.

Once you have determined the site you will create, make sure it is an adequate size. Every business is different, so make sure your site’s design and structure are such as well. Suppose you are new to the website making process. In that case, you should consider using an online image editor such as Photoshop, rather than a Website developer software such as HostGator’s Builder or GoDaddy’s Website Builder.

Your website should be responsive, and it should look and function appropriately on several different devices. In a responsive design, your website has been designed to look and work the same on all the other devices such as desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

Responsiveness is critical, and you need to ensure that it is well suited for any device you have. It should also be simple to use. Once you have decided on your website’s size and design, you will also need to consider your hosting provider’s reseller hosting.

Depending on how much bandwidth you require, you will determine how much you can allocate to this area. You will also need to consider this when creating the site.

Pros and Cons of Web Hosting Providers

When you choose a web hosting provider, there are several pros and cons you should consider.

Pros

Pros of choosing the web hosting provider of your choice include a better understanding of how it works and maintaining it. You will also be able to keep a business that is on a different network to the rest of your business.

  • Web Hosting Providers can provide web servers, web applications, database software, and the infrastructure required for a web host.
  • Web Hosting Providers give you complete flexibility in the design and layout of your website. The tools they provide give you the freedom to determine how your website looks and how it functions.
  • Web Hosting Providers can handle downtime much better than you could ever manage on your own.
  • Web Hosting Providers provide complete security, including data backups and security software.
  • Web Hosting Providers generally provide the resources that you need.
  • They also offer competitive pricing to make sure that they can beat their competitors when it comes to the web hosting business.

Cons

Although web hosting providers have several pros, there are also some cons to consider. The most prominent of the cons is downtime. Web hosts do not always get full bandwidth when a server goes down. They might see your site is up while you see it being down. Using a website down checker is a good idea when this happens. This means that you could be entirely out of the loop even though you are online. This is what makes it so crucial that you have adequate backup procedures.

Another major con is the cost. You will need to be able to match your web hosting provider’s costs with the products and services you are going to purchase to make your site. Costs will always be relative, so you have to match your web hosting provider’s total cost with the total cost of your site. The price of web hosting usually starts at around $5 per month.

You also need to bear in mind that although there are many benefits to web hosting, it also comes with several drawbacks.

Final Thoughts

No matter how you want to run your business or what it is, it is always good to use a website. The business would not run without a website, so why would your site not benefit from a website? A web hosting provider’s advantages include improved security, better support, and support on your project.

With the help of a website builder, you can design a great site, and then you can customize it as you see fit. A web hosting provider will give you the web hosting you need and the support that you need.

So, next time you need a website, you should seriously think about a web host. You may be able to get a web host for as little as £14.95 a month. The best web hosting companies will offer more features and additional services.

An Honest WebHostingHub Review – Absolute Must Know

When developing a web presence for business or personal use, there are many small factors that play into the success of the website, yet the one large decision you must make is who is going to host the website. Literally thousands of websites are in existence that offer web hosting with outstanding platforms, programs that will bolster your search engine presence, and more; so, how do you choose?

The Process is Simple

The process is simple: look for affordability, up-time and guarantees that go above and beyond the call of service, which is best found within the services of WebHostingHub, a premier solution for the business and personal site users that want great service from a server and not pay outrageously for it.

Website In 5 Minutes

With the ability to create a site in literally 5 minutes and offering a free domain with your purchase, the service that you’ll receive is evident in the efforts WebHostingHub puts into their packaged services. They allow you to pick a domain for free when you choose their services, letting you literally be online as fast as 90 minutes from the time you purchase their services. What an excellent service they are!

Choose Your Platform

Not only do they offer software platforms for blogging, such as WordPress and b2Evolution, which are the standard in today’s world of blogging. Simply choose the platform you want from your control panel, and you’ll be on your way by clicking the installation button and let the blog install itself; excellent for beginning to novice blog users. Read more about this on Hosting Manual.

Sell Stuff The Way It Makes Sense

For those that would like to incorporate e-commerce into their new website, WebHostingHub is top-notch by offering the best shopping carts, such as ZenCart, CubeCart, and OS Commerce, while offering a share SSL platform for a level of security that your customers can come to rely on.

Provide Great Content

While offering your customers online shopping in a safe format, you can also expect to receive the same deep levels of security with content management systems such as Joomla, Drupal, Geeklog, Mambo and Moodle.

WebHostingHub simply cares for your online presence to the point they offer these platforms free of charge and assist with the install of the programs, too.

Don’t Let Them Limit Your Emailing

Have a large group of people that need email addresses? No problem; you will receive, with your domain, unlimited email addresses as well as forwarding options to connect mail that comes to specific boxes with users who have email elsewhere.

No Downtime Transfer

And one of our favorite features about WebHostingHub is there ‘No-Downtime Transfer’ guarantee, which means that while your site is being moved, a temporary URL will be created to streamline your move and still allow visitors to come by and purchase or interact with you at the old location.

The Choice Is Obvious

With a top notch customer service group that is standing by online at all times, tech support that is educated and willing to go the distance, and prices that are well below the industry standard for what you receive, the choice is obvious for new businesses and personal bloggers to choose WebHostingHub today.

A2Hosting Review – ~200ms Load Time with Turbo

A2Hosting is an online service provider that has been around since 2003. Based in Houston, TX the company claims to have hosted over a million websites through their service to date. Though A2Hosting has been around for more than a decade, they are not as popular as some of the other hosting companies on the market today. In fact, many people have never even heard of them.

A2Hosting

That, however, is quickly changing since A2Hosting was purchased by Endurance International Group and went through a major revamp and re-launch in 2015. Initially, A2Hosting was running on older cPanel. However, as part of the revamp, not only did they get a whole new website design, but they also switched over to the latest cPanel.

This move enabled them to provide their customers with a more reliable and feature-rich control panel. A2Hosting also introduced a bevy of new features down the line with a new low price.

In other words, the purpose of the revamp was to offer their customers more flexibility. They want their customers to be able to easily choose which options and features they wanted to use.

Going out from this A2Hosting review we are going to dive a little deeper and discuss all things A2Hosting. In essence, we are going to analyze uptime, reliability, the pros and cons of the service and much more.

By the end of this review you will be able to easily decide if A2Hosting is the right host for you.

A2Hosting Review – What Exactly Do You Get?

If you are looking for a budget friendly host, you will absolutely love A2Hosting. For just $2.75 per month you will get a free domain name, unlimited add on domains, unlimited data transfer, unmetered storage capacity, access to hundreds of A2Hosting templates, a free email address and free marketing tools.

Please note in order to be eligible for the $2.75 per month option you must opt for the 36-month term. There are also shorter terms for a higher monthly fee.

With A2Hosting you will get everything you need to succeed online. And while most online service providers seem identical on the surface, in reality they are not. Here are a few additional features that come with A2Hosting plans:

Access To The Best tools On The Web

With A2Hosting you will have access to all the best tools on the Web. You will be able to create a blog, build an online store or set up a photo gallery with the click of a button. It doesn’t get any better than that!

Ecommerce Hosting – 21st Century Technology for Businesses

Ecommerce hosting is a special type of hosting available for companies that wish to have an online store. In fact, ecommerce is just a fancy technical name for a web shop. Some of the most visited websites on the planet, such as Amazon.com or Ebay.com are sites specializing in ecommerce and trading online.

Whatever business you have, you can find many good providers on the Internet, who will have fully-fledged applications in order for you to be able to set up your web shop.

The features of Ecommerce hosting that you should be looking for

It’s always a good idea to look at the competition whenever you are trying to set up a business. It’s no different when you’re searching for an ecommerce hosting provider. If you’re in the business of selling used books online, or you’re starting up a trading company in your local area powered by the Internet, then you would do well to take a look at some of the more popular sites to see if you can find a provider that will give you many of the features that make these companies successful in the first place.

A good rating system powered by users. Concerning ecommerce hosting, one of the most important aspects of any ecommerce website is a good rating system that is driven by the users themselves. Potential clients would like to know whether a product is worth investing in or not and the best way you can do this (apart from of course making high quality products in the first place!) is to allow them to rate and comment on their purchases.

You can use a 5 star system or a value out of 10, but whichever you pick you should allow them to talk about the pros and cons of the product they have bought and also compare it to other similar products. Some sites also allow their clients to write reviews about their products. For instance, when you buy a book on Amazon.com, you can write a book review about it which every person who searches for that book will see.

Excellent categories and a fast database. When you’re searching for ecommerce hosting, you need to find a provider that gives dedicated servers that will allow you to store massive amounts of data, with potentially thousands (or in the case of Ebay, millions) of clients clicking on links at the same time. Nothing is more frustrating to a user than waiting for links to load while they are searching for something.

Shopping carts and one-click purchasing. Online shopping carts can be a valuable tool for consumers who would like to buy more than one product at a time in a bulk order. It should be flexible and allow users to add and remove products with ease, and the price should be updated automatically. For instance, on the Apple Store (store.apple.com) the price automatically updates as you add and remove items when you are building a new computer or buying an iPad. One click purchasing is another excellent tool that you should be looking for in an ecommerce hosting site, which allows returning customers to make purchases quickly with the click of the button once they are logged in.

Client registration and military-grade security and encryption. Clients should be able to register accounts. This is especially true if you are trading in electronic currency. When customers purchase an item, they should be able to securely input their credit card information and remove it if they no longer need your services. The ecommerce hosting company that you select should be Verisign authorized and provide secure, SSL transactions for electronic purchases. There are so many stories in the news these days of major companies losing sensitive customer financial information to hackers, so you have to make sure you have all your security issues covered.

Suggested purchases. Based on customer history, many ecommerce hosting sites provide a list of suggested purchases. For instance, if a customer likes to buy books written by Stephen King and Dean Koontz on Amazon, then after a while Amazon will suggest similar titles to that customer. This is a very effective marketing strategy and can significantly boost your sales.

Contact information and quick customer service. Your ecommerce hosting provider should provide quick customer service to your clients. They should have call centers as well as online options such as e-mail or chat rooms, and any billing issues should be resolved as soon as possible. All your contact information should be provided on the website and customers should feel that they can trust you with their money.

Here is a list of other things that you should ideally be looking for when you are searching for an ecommerce hosting company:

  • multi-level fly out menus (customers hate clicking)
  • W3C/XHTML compliant templates (customers should be able to use the site on any computer)
  • easy to edit for your web designer
  • personalized logos, themes, texts, e-mail templates and so on
  • web based control panel (no special software needed to run the site)
  • search engine optimization (custom product urls, custom category urls, www redirects
  • accept preorders
  • shipping guide and shipping estimates
  • refunds and store credits
  • delivery dates and special event deliveries
  • shipping and tracking numbers
  • e-mail order confirmation
  • terms and conditions for clients
  • add/select multiple items to shopping cart
  • one click reordering
  • images database for products
  • embedded videos for some products, customer reviews
  • automatic inventory and stock control updated on website
  • tax rates and calculations
  • special offers, promotion codes, bulk purchase discounts
  • sales reporting, inventory reporting, product performance reporting
  • customer demographics for marketing purposes
  • integration with Youtube, Facebook and Twitter

Whatever the product you sell, or whatever the service you provide, partnering with a special ecommerce hosting company instead of trying to set everything up by yourself or with limited help on standard domain name registrars is a good idea. Going the route of the ecommerce hosting is by far the more efficient way of doing business, because you can worry less about the administration and technical aspects of the web store and worry more about the important things, such as customer service and great products.