2016

Raid vs. Backups vs. Off-Site Cloud Backups

When talking about data protection there are 3 different levels and types.

RAID: Although often grouped with Backups, RAID offers redundancy, and is not a true backup solution. The way RAID works is that a single hard drive failure will not cause data loss. However, if a site is hacked or you accidentally delete a file, there is no previous revisions of the data to restore from. Nevertheless, RAID is an important feature and all of our hard drives run in a RAID-10 setup for maximum speed and reliability.

Standard Backups: The most typical offering by web hosts, this offers backups that are stored on a secondary drive in the same server. Although this offers restore solutions from a basic hacking or file deletion, it is a very mediocre solution. Situations of physical damage to the server or data center, hackings of the entire server, or power surges/outages will results in permanent data loss.

Amazon Cloud Backups: Included on all of our hosting plans, Amazon Cloud Backups are the ultimate in backup solutions. Accounts are encrypted and securely transmitted to the Amazon S3 Cloud for storage. Amazon, a pioneer in the cloud storage space, offers the most redundant and reliable storage solutions on the planet. All data is secured and can survive almost any catastrophic situation.

Amazon S3 Redundancy

Web Hosting Technology

To have a fast loading website you need a combination of a couple of things:

Hardware: You need the latest and greatest in terms of hardware. Most importantly, for ultimate speed you need to be running enterprise-level SSD drives in a RAID-10 configuration. That’s something we do on all of our servers. The ensures that the data loading from the server hard drives loads without any delay. Traditional non-SSD hard drives can make websites load up to a second slower, which makes all the difference in today’s fast-loading world. Additionally, you need to be running the latest processors (the more core’s the better) and adequate amounts of ram. With enough ram, MySQL temp tables can be put completely into memory, increasing the speed of MySQL queries.

Software: Now all operating systems and http frameworks are made equal. We run a custom built Linux OS, with a custom optimized version of Apache bundled with FCGI for faster page loads, faster php executions and faster overall websites.

Optimizations: You can’t optimized a server to be the fastest at multiple platforms. For this reason, we custom build and optimized each server for each specific CMS. For example, Magento servers run a custom flavor of MySQL and are specifically built from the ground up to be optimized for Magento level queries.

Network: You can have the best hardware, most optimized server, and the best support – but if you’re hosted on a second-tier network, your sites will load slow. Our data center uses only tier-1 upstream bandwidth providers to make sure your site loads fast from everywhere in the world.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

So how do we compare? We pitted ourselves against the biggest web hosts in the world – specifically those that claim to offer the fastest hosting. In the end, the numbers speak for themselves:

#1. T35 Hosting 0.7s, 97/100, faster than 95% of all tested websites

#2. RackSpace 2.64, 75/100, faster than 60% of all tested websites

#3. HostGator 2.97s, 62/100, faster than 55% of all tested websites

#4. BlueHost, 3.06s, 74/100, faster than 54% of all tested websites

#5. MediaTemple 3.37s, 73/100, faster than 49% of all tested websites

Shared Hosting

The most widely recognized kind of hosting, shared hosting is what you’ll find when you go to most major providers like GoDaddy and is often priced at just a few dollars a month. Websites hosted this way literally share server space with tens of thousands of other users, sharing the server resources between all the accounts. That means your site is using a piece of the disk space, processor speed, memory and bandwidth offered by the server while competing with tens of thousands of other accounts for the same resources.

While this setup is useful when you’re just starting out and your site is small, it can become a problem when traffic picks up or if another site hosted on the server begins to grow. There’s only so much server power to go around, and too much usage from any single user will result in slower response times or even downtime for others.

Perhaps even more importantly there is a matter of security. With so many users sharing the same hardware, if just one website has a problem with site security, all the others could be at risk. To limit this, shared hosting providers often put restrictive limits on inodes, cpu usage and much more. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always help overcome the consequences of having tens of thousands of websites on a single server.

Managed Hosting

With a managed hosting account, you get what is often known as application-level management from the web host. Everything from the physical server to the programming is designed specifically to support a single application such as WordPress. That means the staff handling the infrastructure knows exactly how to take care of it to provide the best possible user experience. Additionally, the site will load quicker and more reliably since it’s on a platform specifically optimized for that CMS.

Managed hosting accounts typically have much less clients on each server to offer a more premium experience. Where most budget shared hosting plans will cram thousands or tens of thousands of clients on a server, managed hosting accounts usually have only 5-50 clients on a single server. This hosting environment can also handle a lot more traffic without sacrificing speed, making it a good choice if you’re using your site for business (where a slow or down website can cost you money).

Ultimately, you pay more for managed hosting than shared, but you get more in terms of speed, reliability, uptime and security. At T35 Hosting, we only offer managed hosting. This ensures that your website is fast, secure, reliable and always up.