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The best explanation of VPS I have ever been given was through an analogy. It should help you understand the basics.

Shared Hosting (also known as Web Hosting) is the Public Bus of the hosting industry. You will get to where you need to go, but the selected route might not be your ideal path. Plus, you will have to make all the stops along the way to pick up other riders. Shared Hosting has you share the overall resource of a server with a large number of clients. Since you share the server, you share the costs. Shared Hosting is ideal for low maintenance sites that don’t except high unmanageable traffic.

Dedicated Hosting would be equivalent owning your own Car. You are able to get to Point A to Point B at your convenience. However, you are also responsible for gas and maintenance. Dedicated servers provide you all the resources of a server to use at your discretion. However, you are also responsible for all the maintenance and cost associated with ownership. Dedicated Hosting is ideal for businesses that need to be able to control and fully customize their servers to meet the demands of this company.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS Hosting) would be the Vanpool in this analogy. With a vanpool, a select number of participants share all the resource and cost of the van. This allows for efficient transportation without the inconvenience of a method like a bus. VPS is often the step between Shared and Dedicated Hosting because it offers many of the benefits of Dedicated without the limitations of Shared Hosting.

We just got back from the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. Not only did we managed to be productive in Vegas, but we were also able to squeeze in a little fun (Check out our CEO, Haralds, and VP of Human Resources, Jason with Question Mark Guy). Even though our feet and legs were tried – it was actually harder than I thought to stand for 10 hours – we were able to meet a lot of great people.

Superb Internet is still a strong and recognized brand, and this summit provided a great opportunity to showcase our product offerings – Dedicated Servers, Managed Hosting, VPS, Colocation, Web Hosting and our Reseller programs.

When is discount more than a deal? When that discount helps you make money. Superb.NET already boasts one of the best reseller programs in the industry. With rewards from referrals to graduated discounts that improve with performance. Resellers are even capable of generating up to $200K in revenue per year.

Now with the recent launch of the hosting industry’s first White Label cPanel Reseller Program, you are able to make the money and build your own brand. Superb.NET will do the background work, while you make the sales.  This can apply to any online based business you can think of (see blog post “Money, Money…” to read about a woman that makes $100K walking dogs). Superb.NET program include branded client panel, statements and free billing control panel. You can even add-on services where Superb.NET handles invoicing, unlimited 24/7 support and customer calls.

The best part about White Label cPanel Reseller Hosting; it is now 10% off on Superb.NET. All you need is the promo code RESELLER. How about 10% off to help you make money – a discount that is more than just a deal. Don’t hesitate because tis’ the season, but only until December 31, 2011.

Is there really a difference?

In the world of hosting, uptime is widely promoted to potential customers, and rightfully so.  If you are about to make an entrance into the online community, investing in a company that promises high uptime is paramount. Lost time equates to potentially losing sales, and no one likes losing money.

So the question is how do you compare between various uptime guarantees? A quick search reveals that Company A offers 99.5% Uptime Guarantee, Company B offers 99.9% Uptime Guarantee and Company C offers 100% Uptime Guarantee. It is important to know the differences behind these claims and the specifics behind a company’s Service Level Agreements (SLA).

To fully understand SLA, it is important to note the numbers that formulate the uptime percentage.    There are 8,760 hours in a calendar year.  Therefore, if Company A offers 99.5% Uptime SLA, the company can have roughly 44 hours of network downtime before you, the customer, is compensated. That is roughly two days, which would be horrible if Murphy’s Law kicked in (anything that can go wrong, does). Now with Company B, 99.9% seems great because you are looking at only about nine hours of downtime. A full business day; however, it could be still be quite costly. No one can predict every possible event that will impact one’s network; therefore, these companies make guarantees that provide a little “breathing” room for these unplanned events.

We are left with Company C, who offered a 100% Uptime Guarantee.  The company does recognize that unplanned events happen and that there are circumstances outside of everyone’s control.  The company does, however, promises that if the network does go down that there will be immediate compensation for the downtime period.  This is the very focus behind a company’s commitment to customer service. Company C recognizes your uptime is crucial to your business, and is ready to provide the support you need to be successful.

So when selecting a company to host your site or manage your servers, make sure you select a company that values you, the customer.

It is easy to create your own site with a number of free tools available online from Google Sites to Weebly. You can even a flash ready site can be created in minutes with Wix. However, running a web-based can be tough. When done right, you can find it to be quite lucrative like this $100K dog-walker. Seriously, who makes six-figures walking dogs, but a simple idea back with an effective website can do wonders for your pocketbook.

Now the market is evolving. We are more connected than ever. Did you know there have been a combined 500 million downloads of Angry Birds across all platforms in less than two years after launch? To put that into context, Facebook, took nearly six years to hit 500 million. Angry Birds is now advertising gold – from TV commercials to plush toys.

Obviously, not every business will be the next Facebook or Angry Birds. However, a successful business model is backed by a superb structure. Subtle hint…did ya catch that? Superb.Net has new White Label Reseller Hosting packages, which can handle all the billing so you can handle all the creative. This billing solution is branded with your company’s logo; your customers won’t know that it’s Superb doing the work. Add the Managed Billing option, and Superb.Net will manage the billing platform, invoices, 24/7 support and even call your customers for you as you. Hence the White Label. It is your brand, logo and company that the customer sees.

Whether you are just supplementing your income or your web-based business is your income, it is always best to “work smarter, not harder.” Can you guess which famous late 80s cartoon character said this in his origin story? You can Google it, but what’s the fun in that.

Remember there are a number of options available to improve your business…with Superb .NET’s White Label your billing can be one of them.

As all our customers know, earlier tonight the core1.iad1 router replacement (12008/PRP to 12410/PRP-2) and upgrade of certain ports of it to 10G was completed. However, what deserves to be noted is how smoothly the upgrade went. Even though, temporarily, DCA2 and DCA3 data centres were cut off from the rest of the network, and the SEA2 data centre, SEA1, PAO1, SJC1, and LAX1 sites from DCA2 and DCA3, all communication between DCA2, DCA3 and the rest of our network continued uninterrupted. This is a feat that, to the best of our knowledge, no other IP backbone has been able to accomplish, even in most dire of circumstances. Namely, ensuring that network connectivity is uninterrupted even when local network connectivity between some backbone sites is lost, having complete redundancy of not just transport but also transit – and with the advanced and failure-safe configuration in place.

This was the first real world performance of our 9 years ago designed unique system of numerous checks and balances and advanced, nearly never used by other networks, configuration directives, designed to automatically make one network site that is cut off from the rest communicate to the rest of our network over the public Internet – that is, accept our own AS routes in our own AS, but, only so when they are not reachable via the hopone.net backbone itself.

While this advanced configuration – that no other network has been able to architect and implement safely and transparently – was in place for nearly a decade, we had never had any network outage or issues that would have invoked it. Until, that is, this night’s scheduled replacement (upgrade) of the core1.iad1 router. And, much to our delight, it worked flawlessly just as designed. And, unlike any other backbone that would have had massive outages and customer impact in such a case, there was just a few second blip as various IP networks recalculated their routes to us, and all continued running normally.

This is a truly amazing achievement (and I am never one to use such words lightly) worth noting, showing how the hopone.net backbone is truly far ahead of the rest and is more fault tolerant by its numerous redundancy and failover layers than any other backbone.

Have you considered pursuing a career in the tech industry? Superb Internet is a fast-growing, progressive, and caring company seeking qualified, long-term candidates to join us. Currently, we are working to recruit staff for positions at our network operations centers in Seattle, Washington, McLean, Virginia, and Springfield, Virginia, as well as at our corporate headquarters in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Our employees cite a variety of great reasons why they enjoy working for Superb, but don’t just take our word for it. Take some time out to get to know us through our recent interview at webhostingsearch.com, and if you like what you see then take a look at our open positions and see if you might be the perfect fit for our team.

Can you believe it’s October already? Time to get out the sweaters and scarves and dive into some Halloween candy (but leave some for the trick-or-treaters)! It’s time once again for the latest issue of The Spearhead, Superb’s monthly newsletter. A peek at what we have in store for you this month:

SEO & You: Advanced SEO Tips:We wrap up our series with guidelines on how to make sure you’re using HTML to your best advantage.

Newly Relaunched VPS: Superb VPS has guaranteed resources, burstable RAM, RAID-10 disk space…and the list goes on!

One Click-Install GridIron Applications: Find out how these valuable add-on tools can help you better manage your hosting account.

Superb Advocates Program: Our newly-launched program rewards our loyal clients for giving us kudos on popular websites—check out our top supporters for the month and find out how you can start earning rewards!

Employee Spotlight: Finally, we chat one-on-one with our CFO, Alex Laguardia, and welcome our new team members.

Check out the full newsletter here!