Choosing a web hosting service: the options
An outline of the options relating to service and reliability when choosing a host service provider for your website.
As far as a visitor to your website is concerned reliability is measured as being able to access the site at anytime and being able to complete the actions they require.
This is achieved through a combination of hardware and software technologies.
A web hosting service needs to provide a solution to your hosting requirements on the Internet: maximum availability coupled with high performance delivered over sufficient bandwidth that will cope with peak demand.
Web hosting service options: the basics.
The web hosting service can be provided as a package by a web hosting company. The basic types of hosting options that a web hosting company may offer include: shared server, virtual private server (VPS), dedicated server and colocation.
Shared server.
A shared server is described as an entry-level hosting option. The website resides on a single server machine with other websites. Reliability may be affected by heavy traffic on the other sites and there may be security risks. You normally have limited features and control.
Virtual private server (VPS).
VPS is a system of sharing the physical server with other VPS customers. The website resides in a protected area on a shared server and has its own allocation of RAMrandom access memory and CPUcentral processing unit. Reliability is not affected by traffic on the other sites and is this system is not vulnerable to the security issues of a shared server. You have more control over software installations and the system will most likely runs its own copy of the operating system and root access allowing the construction of secure sub-directories.
Dedicated server.
Dedicated servers are normally required by companies with advanced level mission critical hosting requirements. The responsibility for the reliability can be shared with the web hosting company whom can provide technical expertise in a ‘managed dedicated server’ package solution. You would be provided with your own private server with total root access, RAM, CPU and operating system. This arrangement can give increased reliability and security over VPS hosting. This system offers more capabilities for adding software applications. High levels of connectivity and scalability can be achieved.
Colocation.
Colocation entails you, the client, supplying the web hosting company with a server machine and they will provide the rack space on their premises together with the Internet connection. Technical help is normally provided for the initial installation but some technical knowledge by the client is normally required. There may be other network administration issues and costs.
General technologies to promote reliability.
Load balancing and load sharing.
Load balancing involves dividing the processing and communication work between two or more servers. This may employ the use of hardware, software or a combination of both. Physical servers can be placed in different geographical locations.
DNS Round Robin is an example of a software solution used for load balancing. The tendency now is to use hardware load-balancing packages employing switches and routers to distribute the traffic and these solutions may be described as load sharing. These technologies augment server clustering.
Server clustering.
Server clustering combines the use of multiple servers and multiple interconnections to create a single system. Sometimes called a server farm, hosting farm, data center (datacentre) or web farm, clustering offers greater scalability: as traffic increases then the size of the cluster can be increased in number. In a cluster if one server fails another can act as a back up, increasing reliability and promoting high availability.
High availability.
High availability refers to a system that is operational for a great percentage of time. Normally in order for a system to be available all the individual components need to function but this can be circumvented by including redundant components.
Redundant components.
Redundant components describes system components such as fans, hard drives, servers, power supplies, that can be considered to be surplus to the normal running of that system. If the primary component fails then the other can take its place with no loss of service. A system that meets these criteria can be described as fault-tolerant.
Redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is an example of redundancy and a way of storing the same data in two different places. RAID will appear to an operating system as one disk and is also known as disk mirroring.
Specific service requirements from a web hosting company.
Bandwidth.
Bandwidth in this scenario is the amount of data that is transferred to and from the website. A web hosting company will offer this as a metered or un-metered connection.
A metered connection normally sets a limit on the total amount of data transfer per month. For example at 100GB per month although the maximum connection speed or rate will be set quite high: at perhaps 512kbps (kilo bits per second) for example.
An un-metered connection may not set a limit to the total amount of data transfer per month however there will be a maximum connection rate set which may be limited to 256kbps for example.
As the bandwidth required is determined by the size and nature of the website and the number of visits you expect. You should consider any business expansion in your traffic model.
For example let us take a website with 2000 registered and 2000 non-registered customers and experiencing site visits at 100 per hour, taking an average site visit at 1MB of data transfer, this current model would require 75GB per month and at 100MB per hour which converts to approximately 240kbps.
Disk space.
Depends on the size and type of data stored on the website. With a dedicated server option this should not be a problem.
Scripting engines and database.
Make sure the web hosting company supports your chosen dynamic web page programming environment: PHP, cfm, ASP, ASP.NET as examples coupled with the option for a database such as MySQL.
Backup.
This should occur on at least a daily basis of the whole site. Check who is responsible for this, what time of day it will be done and what will be the medium used: tapes, disks and whether the backup is stored off premises. The files on the backup medium may need to be encrypted to protect sensitive customer data.
Support.
What is the level of technical support offered by the web hosting company and the cost rates? Is this provided over the telephone, email or a forum type environment? Ideally it should be both email and telephone and available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
Transferring files and data to and from your web server space.
Are sufficient file transfer protocol (FTP) accounts provided and is it possible to set access levels to the individual FTP accounts? You may not wish to allow full access to staff purely assigned to site maintenance. Sensitive files containing customers’ private details are vulnerable when in transit over the Internet. Is Secure Shell for Workstations (SSH) or equivalent program that allows secure uploads and downloads over the Internet available?
E-commerce security considerations.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) in conjunction with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) may need to be integrated into the website as this is currently the most popular technology used in an e-commerce website where customers’ credit card details are transferred over the public and insecure Internet.
Administration software.
Is it possible to monitor bandwidth usage? Will there be a breakdown of the popular and busy sections of the web site? A web hosting company’s web stats package can provide a great deal of information on visitor usage. Are the activity log files accessible for examination for security purposes?
Custom error pages.
Is it possible to display your own custom error pages? For example: error 404 ‘file not found’. It would be gentler on the visitor if this were replaced with a custom personalised error apology page.
General questions.
Does the web hosting company run their own data centre, or do they rent space on someone else’s?
Is it a climate controlled environment and is the data centre physically secure?
What levels of uptime rates do they boast and what quality are their connections to the Internet?
Do they run their own domain name system (DNS) servers?
Summary.
Producing a reliable service for your visitor may entail exploiting many of the above current technologies. A suitable web hosting company should have the expertise to utilize those technologies to achieve maximum uptime for the website. Now armed with suitable and relevant questions it should be possible to approach a web hosting company to formulate a plan to create that service.
Article by: Contributed.
Date: 7th July 2009.
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