Why Netnibble?
With literally thousands of hosting companies advertising “special” hosting deals, why should you choose Netnibble as your hosting partner? Well, let’s see if we can point out a few important differences between us and many, many other hosting companies:
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We don’t try to trick you into thinking that you’re going to get zillions of megabytes of disk space and bandwidth each month for just a handful of dollars. Hosts that advertise plans with hundreds of gigabytes available rely on the fact that most of their customers will never be able to use up all of the space they think they’re getting. What host is going to install a 200 gigabyte drive (or bigger) into a server every time he gets an order for one of these super-duper king-size packages, and dedicate it entirely to a single customer, just in case you somehow manage to fill it up during the course of the next 3 or 4 years? This practice of offering big carrots to tempt you is known as “over-selling”, and simply results in hundreds of customers being crammed onto a single server, all jockeying for disk space, memory and CPU resources. Netnibble does not subscribe to this concept because we feel it is misleading so, to put it in simple terms, Netnibble does NOT oversell. In fact, we stock our servers to around 75% of the disk space sold, and then add another server, so what you buy is exactly what you get, and is yours to do with as you wish. If you don’t use up all of your space, it remains empty within your allocation, available to you alone whenever your needs increase.
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Virtualized Hosting: As we’ve already mentioned, some hosting companies try to cram as many customers as possible onto huge servers (and sometimes cut corners by using under-powered servers not really suitable for hosting thousands of web sites). In doing so they run a high risk of server failure, particularly if a customer begins to use a badly-written script which locks up the entire server, causing problems for all other customers on that server. Netnibble employs a system of Virtualized Containers for smaller groups of customers, each container acting as a cocoon for that smaller customer group, sheltering them from issues that might occur elsewhere on the host server. Each container hosts between 10 and 30 customer accounts, and we have the flexibility to control the load on each container by seamlessly managing where each account is hosted, providing a virtually trouble-free environment for our customers’ web sites and email. The host servers (or “nodes”) are multi-CPU super-servers, crammed with RAM, designed specifically for this innovative type of hosting.
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Most web hosts advertise that they back up their data. Yes of course they back up their servers, to facilitate restoring data onto a new server if one goes down (and they ALL do, one day), but what happens if just a single web site, or even a single file, needs restoring? Are they going to search through back-up tapes or huge NAS devices just to find a few files to “put a web site right”? Unlikely, to say the least. Netnibble’s backup policy is, however, somewhat different. Of course our servers are backed up regularly to facilitate disaster recovery, but we also back up each and every shared-hosting customer’s web sites every night, every week, and every month, and we back them up to secure, remote servers in a different data-center. So, when that dreaded day comes that you might drop an almighty clanger with your web site design, and trash your site, feel free to simply open a support ticket and ask us to recover your site to how it was last night, last week, or even last month, and we’ll be happy to help. As long as you don’t make a regular habit of asking us to do this, we’ll not even charge you for doing it and you can even ask support what time your site is backed up each night so that you can time your updates and edits accordingly! Of course, you are urged to make your own backups too (it’s easy to do within your control panel) - There are NEVER too many backups!
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DNS and nameservers are possibly the most under-discussed element of hosting web sites but, in fact, without DNS no-one would ever find your web site or be able to send you emails. Despite this, vast numbers of web hosting companies rely on just a single pair of name-servers to direct traffic to their paying customers’ web sites (and often operate their DNS in just one datacenter!) meaning that, if their DNS fails, their customers’ web sites vanish off the Internet! And, to make matters worse, DNS information is often cached for hours (even days in some cases) so even a breakdown of a few minutes could result in thousands of lost web site hits, and sales. Not so with Netnibble - We provide you with a minimum of 4 DNS servers for your domain, each sited remotely from the others - In fact we have 3 in different parts of the USA, one in London UK, one in Holland in mainland Europe, and another in Singapore. In the almost impossible situation that more than 1 of our DNS servers is off-line for more than a few minutes, we also have back-up DNS servers in another 4 separate locations that can be deployed quickly to plug the gap.
These are just a few of the more obvious differences between Netnibble and a large number of other hosting companies, and we think that they’re important enough to state here in order to assist you in making an informed choice of your hosting partner for your web sites. With this in mind, please browse the range of web hosting packages available from each of our national and regional sites, and feel free to contact us at pre-sales@netnibble.net if you have any questions or concerns prior to placing an order.
