Web Hosting: Which is the host with the most?So you want to publish a web site do you? Welcome to the club. These days it seems that almost everyone has a web site of some kind, and thousands more continue to be launched every day. It's challenging enough to design a site and fill it with interesting content, but when all is said and done another challenge still remains - where to host it?
A popular choice for newbie webmasters, and even experienced ones, is to secure a free hosting plan with a company such as Yahoo! Geocities, Tripod or Angelfire. While these are easy to setup and free of charge, they do have limitations. Most free hosts don't offer all the nice features that paid hosts do such as FTP access, CGI-BIN, or your own personal domain name. Instead you're stuck with minimal features and a generic URL such as www.freewebhost.com/marcswebsite. This somewhat limits your web site‘s potential. Most free hosts also require you to run banners or pop-up ads on your web site to make it worth their while - these banners and pop-ups can obstruct the view of your web page and ultimately annoy visitors and drive them away. Lastly, most free hosts have a daily bandwidth limit that is very small, so if you do get a lot of traffic you'll most likely exceed the allotted bandwidth and your site will be temporarily disabled. Overall I would recommend free web hosts for people that are new to web hosting and want to get a feel for how it works. I'd also recommend them for web sites that are personal in nature (such as an online journal) as well as web sites that don't plan to generate any revenue. Free web hosts are a great stepping stone to paid web hosts - I myself starting building web sites 4 years ago using free hosts, and today I run several high traffic web sites that are hosted on paid web hosting plans.
Now it's time to get into the good stuff - paid web hosting. Web hosting companies that charge money for their services are plentiful on the Internet, and feature a wide array of hosting packages at various price points. First we begin with so called "budget" web hosts, who claim to offer you the world for only $1 per month. Having used numerous such companies I feel I must tell you to proceed with caution here, as these companies aren't all that they are cracked up to be. Many claim to offer 24/7 e-mail support, which in my experience turned out to be 0/0 e-mail support. My e-mails were either never answered or answered a week after I sent them. Even when I got a response it was generic in nature and completely unhelpful. Also, expect frequent outages with these budget web hosts as they rarely even have their own web servers - often they are reselling space on someone else's web servers over which they have no control. One budget web host I used went down unexpectedly for 6 days, and they didn‘t even bother to notify their customers. As a result, my web site was down for 6 days and I lost most of my visitors as well as my hard-earned search engine rankings. Lesson learned: if the reliability and success of your web site is important to you, budget web hosting might not be the answer. However, this is not to say that all budget web hosts are bad - 1dollarhosting.com is one of the leaders in the budget web hosting arena and has quite a good reputation.
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Webfarms: The Only Way To Host!
Brad Kingsley
Networks can be configured to be so incredibly redundant now - for reasonable prices - that there is no excuse for a data center not to achieve five nines (99.999%) of availability.But what about the servers and applications? Why spend so much time up front configuring the network to make sure it doesn't fail, and then deploy an application to a single server?
Sure, there are ways to make sure individual servers have some redundancy to minimize failures -- things like RAID1, RAID5, or RAID10 (redundant array of inexpensive disks) which will protect against a disk drive failure (and I highly recommend this type of configuration for all production servers - and preferably the use of hardware RAID vs. software RAID). But what happens if a file gets corrupt on the RAID array? Or a recent configuration change brings the application down? Or a newly released patch conflicts with other settings and causes problems? Well, in these situations the server will go down and the application(s) hosted on that server will be offline.
A good monitoring and alerting process will allow the system administrator to detect and address these issues quickly, but still there will be some level of downtime associated with the issue. And depending on the type of issue, even the best system administrator might not be able to immediately resolve the issue - it may take time. Time during which your application is unavailable and you may be losing business due to the site interruption.
So, what can you do?
A great option - and one that has recently become more affordable - is to host your application on a webfarm. A webfarm consists of two or more web servers with the same configuration, and that serve up the same content. There are special switches and processes involved that allow each of these servers to respond to a request to a single location. For example, say we have two servers - svr1.orcsweb.com and svr2.orcsweb.com - that have 100% the same configuration and content. We could configure a special switch* to handle traffic that is sent to www.orcsweb.com and redirect the traffic to either of these nodes depending on some routing logic. All clients visiting the main URL (in this case www.orcsweb.com) have no idea whether this is a single server - or ten servers! The balancing between nodes is seamless and transparent.
[*note: There is also software that could handle the routing process but experience and test have shown that these types of solutions are generally not as scalable, fast, or efficient as the hardware switch solutions]
The routing logic can be a number of different options - most common are:
* Round-robin: Each node gets a request sent to it "in turn". So, node1 gets a request, then node2 again, then node1, then node2 again. * Least Active: Whichever node shows to have the lowest number of current connects gets new connects sent to it. This is good to help keep the load balanced between the server nodes. * Fastest Reply: Whichever node replies faster is the one that gets new requests. This is also a good option - especially if there are nodes that might not be "equal" in performance. If one performs much better than the other, why not send more requests there?
In any of these scenarios the switch will also detect if a node were to fail. So, if svr1.orcsweb.com was taken offline for maintenance - or it had a critical failure - the switch would detect that and only send traffic to svr2.orcsweb.com. And since the clients always access the site via the main URL (not the node names) they have no idea that one of the nodes is down - the application continues to serve client requests seamlessly.
Besides high-availability (continuing to satisfy requests during a failure), a webfarm also gives an application a higher level of scalability - the ability to handle more and more load. If load increased on the application to the point where performance started to degrade, more nodes could be added to the webfarm (again, without clients noticing), giving the ability to handle potentially unlimited levels of traffic (just keep adding nodes!).
Of course there are a lot of factors surrounding the proper support of a webfarm - the switches, fail over between switches (don't let the switch be a single point-of-failure!), replication of content, synchronization of server changes, synchronization of application changes, etc, etc.. But a good system administrator (or experienced hosting company) can help address all of these issues for you.
By the way, I need to slip in a plug for a related service we offer :-) Webfarm hosting starting as low as $199/month! Check it out at: http://www.orcsweb.com/WebFarm.aspx
Hopefully this has been a good introduction to webfarms for you, and hopefully I've properly communicated enough of the benefits for you to consider this as a hosting option for yourself. With the rates now down to affordable levels - why not get this additional layer of protection?
Happy hosting!
~Brad
Brad Kingsley is President and Founder of ORCS Web, Inc. - a company that provides managed hosting services for clients who develop and deploy their applications on Microsoft Windows platforms.
Brad Kingsley is President and Founder of ORCS Web, Inc. - a company that provides managed hosting services for clients who develop and deploy their applications on Microsoft Windows platforms.
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How Multiple Server Hosting impacts your websites uptimePlease consider the following article for your ezine, ebook or web site. It is free to use as long as you include the resource box at the end. It contains 792 words. If you use this article, please send a brief message to let me know where it appeared. info@irieisle-online.com
Article available for reprint: godfreyh@irieisle-online.com ==================================================== Hosting of web sites has essentially become a commodity. There is very little distinguishing one hosting company from the next. Core plans and features are the same and price is no longer a true determining feature. In fact, choosing a host based on the cheapest price can be more expensive in the long term with respect to reliability issues and possible loss of sales as a result of website downtime.
Selecting a host from the thousands of providers and resellers can be a very daunting task, which may result in a hit and miss approach. But although hosting may have become a commodity, one distinguishing feature that you must always look out for is reliability.
At the heart of any hosting company's reliability is redundancy. This ensures that if a problem exists at one point, there will be an alternative which ensures continuity as seemlessly and transparently as possible.
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