Posted by William Toll

NaviSite small business Dedicated Hosting customers know that this time of the year Internet traffic begins to pick up measurably. Ecommerce begins to soar as consumers begin researching and buying goods and services online. Financial and insurance firms experience an end of the year rush to prepare for the new year of taxes. Small businesses run end of year reports.

Given the explicit cost of attracting clicks and visitors, businesses need to make every visitor count! Every request to a dedicated server is important! Delays, time-outs and server slow-downs are not acceptable, this time of the year or any time of the year for that matter! Read more…

Posted by Chris Patterson

The biggest industry buzzword over the last year has been “Cloud Computing.” Every software and service provider has rolled out offerings that they say will put your business “in the cloud,” but each has a different definition. There has been so much confusion around the term that on the Wikipedia page for Cloud Computing, you can almost see the white-out.  To simplify it further, we would like to take this opportunity to weigh in on our definition of the term using as few buzzwords as possible. Read more…

Posted by Chris Patterson

As an enabler of PCI compliant environments, at NaviSite, we are frequently asked questions about what is the best way to comply with various components of the PCI Data Security Standard, as well as many other regulations. One of the key features of the DSS is the flexibility that is afforded by each organization when it comes to how specific controls are implemented, and one of the most commonly asked is around requirement 6.6. The PCI standard states the following:

For public-facing web applications, address new threats and vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis and ensure these applications are protected against known attacks by either of the following methods:

•  Reviewing public-facing web applications via manual or automated application vulnerability security assessment tools or methods, at least annually and after any changes
• Installing a web-application firewall in front of public-facing web applications

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Posted by William Toll

Hard Disks have moving parts.  Hard Disks fail.  Hard Disk failures can result into data loss.  Small businesses that loose data are at a greater risk of business failure and financial hardship. The hard disk industry knows this and a recent Carnegie Mellon University study looked at 100,000 hard drives and reached to the conclusion that hard drive manufacturers were exaggerating their meantime before failure (MTBF) rates by 15%. NaviSite strongly encourages businesses to seek solutions and providers that encourage the greater use of technologies like RAID.

Let’s discuss RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) which, when implemented, can significantly increase a server’s reliability and performance while decreasing risk by an order of magnitude. Read more…

Posted by Jim Ciampaglio

It is very common in the dedicated hosting industry for companies to “lure” you in with posted low rates or bottom priced servers.  There are quite a few “fly by night” operations that have setup shop overnight with sub-tier infrastructure and drive their marketing strategy around a very low advertised price. This certainly gets some attention but increasingly, customers are becoming wary of this tactic. The age old adage still stand here – if it is too good to be true, it generally is.  The airline industry is a good example – how often has this happened to you?   That fare you saw advertised was 20-30% less than what shows up on your credit card bill!

As businesses increasingly look at their technology assets as revenue source, cost of downtime and associated revenue loss becomes a hard reality.  Reliability, scalability and performance become tangible in this context; especially as the peak holiday season approaches. As customers begin to ask for things like proactive monitoring and management of servers, redundancy of common points of failure, coverage from security threats and attacks on the internet, the $100 server quote jumps by 2X or 3X to get to the desired solution.  Read more…

Posted by Sophia McKeown

The PCI Data Security Standards Council Community meeting held in September was indeed an eye opener. Following up the meeting, we’d like to share NaviSite’s specific observations on the just released revised Data Security Standard, version 1.2:

Wireless Systems Overhaul: The requirements for Wireless systems have increased in recent past and the Council has acknowledged the weakness of the WEP protocol for wireless. Despite its widespread use in the legacy retail systems, WEP protocol would be soon out of use and retailers are looking for ways to address this. Read more…

Posted by Terri Pecorelli

NaviSite participated in Oracle Open World held in San Francisco on September 22-25, 2008 showcasing our Oracle Professional Services. While the overall attendance dipped from 45,000 attendees last year to 40,000 attendees this year, there was significant activity and excitement at the event.

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Posted by Laura Luedeke

When you think about key factors that go into choosing a hosting provider…at the top of any list must be SERVICE.  After all, you are entrusting the foundation of your business into someone else’s hands.

At NaviSite, we have an “Always There” philosophy when it comes to providing service. We have designed our support model to provide customers with quick and easy answers to any technical questions and be available round the clock. We understand that problems can occur at any time and we have experts ready and available for our customers - only one phone call or quick click away. Our support teams are staffed 24×7x365 and are always ready to answer all of your questions. After all, if you have a technical need or question, it should not matter what time it is, day or night…if an urgent needs arises you always want to know that someone is going to answer the call and be – always there. Read more…

Posted by William Toll

Over the past few years, the computing and uptime needs for the SMBs have increased steadily as they have becoming increasingly dependent on their technology infrastructure for both top line growth and bottom line results. In the mid of 2000, many companies grew out of shared Web hosting because of their need for more power, and control at an affordable price.  A new technology began to gain some traction - Virtual Private Servers or VPS in short.  This was a natural progression from the low-end shared hosting packages, empowering businesses with more control on their environment while still retaining some of the advantages of a shared hosting platform including a common operating system, ability to run applications with root access in a well defined logical container. Parallels’ (previously known as SWsoft) Virtuozzo quickly established itself as the leader in the virtualization platform and today has millions of VMs active around the world that many hosting providers launched their VPS offerings on top-of. These VPSs are typically offered at a monthly price point in the sub $100 range.

SMBs demand for increased reliability, security and computing led to the emergence of a new breed of virtualization technology called Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS). VDS is built upon an enterprise technology dubbed as the ‘hypervisor.’ This enables the SMBs to have greater control and flexibility by providing each VDS machine with a dedicated OS instance, thereby eliminating the security and stability issues that come with a typical VPS setup. The picture below helps explain the fundamental architecture difference between the two technologies - VPS and VDS. Read more…

Posted by Jim Ciampaglio

The term “web-hosting reseller” has evolved over the years.  The industry has moved away from the early days of pure-play reselling and now requires value added solutions riding on top of a world class infrastructure to succeed.  Resellers no longer can simply chop up a server and sell the pieces for greater than the whole and call that a business model.  Value-added solutions and being vertically integrated with the customer is now the key to success and revenue growth.

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