Host Media this week launched its Premium cPanel Web Hosting packages, designed to outperform the majority of the hosting services out there today but at a reasonable price.
Some of the key features we focused on were:
- Contention figures and the impacts with more demanding applications (WordPress plugins aren’t getting any smaller)
- Data security from failures by user accidents or hardware failures
- Providing a set of communication tools to provide an alternative to Google Workspace style systems
Contention
Traditionally, most hosting companies define their account limits on servers by a mixture of the power of the CPUs (number of cores/threads and the GHz from them), memory allocation (including the MHz of the RAM chips) and of course the disk space.
You will find some (likely a lot) of companies will follow the practice of, when the server starts to slow down, then there is your limit, and now deploy another server, e.g. the bad way.
What we have done at Host Media is first taken the disk usage for our smallest package and using X percentage of the total usable disk space that we want on our servers, to define the total number of accounts we “could” host. Then working from that we defined the requirements of our CPU and Memory to match it leaving pretty large percentage of resources free (no one likes hitting limits without plenty of room spare).
This is where our contention account limit was set to less than 200 cPanel accounts per server. You may find some companies will least 400 accounts per server and think, “well Host Media must be better” (we like to think so anyway) but it will come down to the hardware they use, the same goes for companies that list 100 accounts per server.
For us, our minimum hardware for our new Premium hosting services are set as follows (as of Feb 2022):
- Minimum 128GB DDR4 RAM
- Minimum E5 v4 CPU Cores (normally with 14 Cores / 28 Threads at 2.5+ Ghz)
- Samsung SSD EVO Drives in a RAID 10 configuration
Data Security
In our previous cPanel hosting services we always done weekly snapshots stored in offsite cloud and/or large storage servers, but with our Premium hosting we wanted to take it further, much further.
Using JetBackup 5, we have used our range of proven off-site storage services to provide the following:
- Daily Incremental Backups
Self-restore any file, email, database and more using the cPanel JetBackup tool from the past 30 days. - Databases Backed Up Every 6 Hours
Extra protection of accidental database or data deletions with backup restore points of all customer databases every 6 hours with the past 7 days + daily for the past 30 days.
In the event of a full hardware disaster, we will be able to restore the latest data for all customers using the JetBackup Recovery tool.
Communication Tools
We have been offering a special kind of email web client for some time, Crossbox, it is one of those applications, once you start using it, you find yourself forgetting about all the others out there. Customers of Host Media have been requesting the expansion of this to include tools that would allow them to move entirely away from Google Workspace, which Crossbox provides. This comes in the form of a combination of tools:
- Crossbox Mail Suite
- Crossbox File Sharing/Management Suite
- Crossbox Chat Service
These tools together, gives you a powerful set of work place services that fits many companies entire business requirements. So it was certainly one we wanted to invest in for our Premium hosting service.
Conclusion
So that is a little inside view of a few key areas we focused on in designing the Premium Web Hosting service that was released this month. We will of course adapt our services further in the future to ensure we keep offering the best set of features with the performance to go with it.