Virtual Hosting Companies

Secure virtual hosting offers more power, flexability, server disk space and bandwidth. Midphase.com, lunarpages.com, hostgator.com and hostmonster.com all offer virtual hosting packages. This hosting review will help you make an informed buying decision when it comes to virtual hosting companies.

MidPhase.com Virtual Hosting Review
Have two VPS plans:  The Silver plan with 150 gigs disk space and 300 gigs bandwidth at $49.95/month and the Gold plan with 250 gigs disk space and 500 gigs of bandwidth for $69.95/month.  Both plans host unlimited domains so this is a pretty good deal. 

Virtual Web Host Lunarpages.com Review
This virtual package comes with 80 gigs of disk space and 1000 gigs of bandwidth for $99.00 per month, which is a little on the expensive side.

Hostgator.com & Virtual Server Packages (Review)
Semi-Dedicated plan provides 25 gigs disk space and 500 gigs bandwidth $74.95/month.  This company concentrates more on shared hosting.

Secure virtual hosting is less expensive than dedicated hosting if your company is on a budget, but still needs multiple websites that are reliable and protected for e-commerce.  Virtual private servers were originally invented as a way for companies that wanted to run or update software on a system that equaled their own server without harming their real operating system.  However, with the web growing faster than new IP addresses could be invented, web hosting companies saw virtual hosting as a way to put many websites on one IP address.  This concept works almost like dedicated hosting, but is much less expensive.  However, in order to get certifiably secure virtual hosting, you have to understand the difference between name-based virtual hosting and IP-based virtual hosting.

With name-based virtual hosting, multiple domains will be hosted on one server under one single IP address.  This means that when a web browser requests a resource from a web server, the domain name has to be part of the address in order to figure out which web site located at the IP address to show to the user.  This has some disadvantages, because this kind of request doesn’t work with every browser, especially older ones. It’s also impossible to have secure virtual hosting because name-based virtual hosts that use the same IP address also have to share the same digital certificate.  In order to get an SSL certificate, which is the recognized standard of security, a domain name must have its own IP address. 

With IP-based virtual hosting, each virtual host is assigned a different IP address. The web server functions either with multiple physical network interfaces, or virtual network interfaces on the same physical interface. As opposed to name-based virtual hosting, the web server software uses the IP address that the user connects to instead of the name in order to determine which web site to show the user. The primary reason for a site to use a dedicated IP address is to be able to use its own SSL certificate rather than a shared certificate.  An issued SSL certificate officially means that you have real secure virtual hosting.

So, make sure to ask your web hosting company if they offer secure virtual hosting with separate IP addresses or if they have name-based virtual hosting and only offer a digital certificate.  A few good companies to ask are: Midphase.com, Lunarpages.com, and Hostgator.com.  Out of the three, Midphase.com is probably the best because they are more oriented towards e-commerce and the least expensive.