Online Mail Server

If you are looking to host your website you could be wondering, should I have a shared hosting account, a VPS hosting account or a dedicated server?

The first difference you will notice is the cost varies dramatically.

Pricing

Shared Hosting prices can range from £19.99 to over £100.00 per annum.
VPS Hosting prices vary from £39.99 to approx £69.99 per month
Dedicated Servers are a different league entirely, ranging from £150.00 per month to around £1000.00 per month.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting would be the most common hosting account purchased, a good starting place for any website. But the negatives include sharing your hosting space and ip address with unknown neighbors. If these “neighbors” decide to use their hosting account for spam or phishing you can end up with an ip address being blacklisted by Google which will negatively impact your search results.

VPS Hosting

VPS Hosting would be the next step up, you are still sharing your resources with x amount of unknown users but you do have a lot more control over what is happening in your webspace. With many VPS hosting accounts you can upgrade RAM and CPU limits almost instantly.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated Servers – a dedicated server provides your company with it’s own machine in the data canter. It is not shared with any other users and you have your own ip address. It is by far the most secure of hosting types if you are storing sensitive data and can be upgraded and monitored easily. Managed dedicated servers are normally the most popular as this way you have trained staff managing any upgrades or maintenance of your account.

Some of the benefits of a dedicated server include :

• As the entire servers resources are dedicated to your website, load times decrease dramatically.
• Since you are not sharing your server with other users who may be testing new scripts that could potentially crash the server, your reliability increases.
• Security risks are lessened since access to a dedicated server is limited.
• Configurable hardware means you can upgrade your dedicated server at any point.
• Custom Firewall protection enables you to run and enforce your own access control policy.
• Dedicated servers allow for unique addresses.

Our recommended dedicated server providers :
Dedicated servers Ireland hostingireland.ie
Dedicated servers UK ukfast.co.uk
Dedicated Servers USsinglehop.com

If you have a dedicated server let us know who it is with and how you find the service.

How do mail servers work?
How do mail servers know where to send your mail?

Mail servers are often described as electronic post offices. They receive, sort and deliver your email and attachments to the address the sender specifies.

Each and every hosting provider and ISP(Internet Service Provider) will be running a mail server program on each of their servers. As soon as you click “Send” on your completed email. Your hosting provider (or ISP depending on your outgoing server settings) will receive your email request.

The first step is to find out where your email is going to, obviously this is obtained through the destination email address you have entered.

From the destination email address the mail server will take out the domain name (e.g xmmailserver.com in our case)

From this domain name the mail server can now obtain a destination IP address. Every domain name that can accept email has an IP address record called an MX record. This tells the mail server which IP address to send the email to.

This destination server will be another hosting companies or ISP’s mail server which in turn will take the mail, find the matching mail account and place the mail into the correct mailbox based on the destination email address.