Web Page Hosting
After producing a web page, the next step is hosting. This is essential to make
the site available for public browsing. It's important to confirm that your
web-hosting provider will maintain the server on which your site is hosted,
as well as manage the technology linking it to the internet.
Service providers should also offer a range of packages that tailor web-hosting
specifications (data storage and transfer) to customers' requirements. These
quantities should be scalable to facilitate club growth.
All packages should involve full technical support, which is vital for any
technically-challenged club.
Technical Aspects of Hosting and How It Works
Establishing a website online requires a combination of several elements,
including somewhere to live – that is, on an area of disk space on a computer. The computer needs to run software
that is designed to send and receive data on a network (in this case on the
internet this network is the World Wide Web). This combination of disk space
and software is called a Server. The other necessary element a working network
connection to the World Wide Web.
When you put together a server solution with networking you have the basis
of web hosting. It's possible to turn a home computer into a web server, but
it's unlikely to offer a quality solution. When you pay for third party web
hosting, you're paying for a specialist company to provide and manage the equipment
and infrastructure for you at a fraction of the cost it would cost you to run
it yourself.
The quality and location of a server and network connection (your web hosting)
has a direct correlation to the quality of experience a visitor to your website
has. Every tim a visitor requests a page from your website, the server is required
to process that information and send the information back across the network
to the visitors browser (such as Internet Explorer). On busy websites, when
this happens hundreds or thousands of times a minute, the amount of data can
become quite large and the amount of processing power required to make it happen
can be intense.
A web-hosting provider has servers that are specifically designed to handle
the processing and network demands of the internet, as well as sophisticated
connections to the internet that provides large capacity data transfers in
and out of these servers.
There are a multitude of different type of web hosting available from thousands
of suppliers, running different software on different servers, with different
quality network connections, so when you coose a web-hosting provider there
are 4 areas to consider – platform,
infrastructure, location and service.
Platform
A platform is a mix of software that can be employed to run on a server.
The choice of web hosting platform is usually a technical decision made by
a web designer, since they'll be programming the website in their preferred
language.
Aspects involved in this decision-making process may include the type of software
platform to be used (such as Windows or Linux), and the scripting languages
used (such as ASP or PHP).
Infrastructure
Infrastructure refers to the hardware, network and configuration offered
by a hosting provider. Most websites are hosted in a 'shared' web-hosting environment,
meaning that there are multiple websites on each server – each website having a protion of the disk space and network resources assigned
to it. Sharing hosting resources in this way brings down the cost of web hosting
for individual customers considerably and is the most popular form of hosting.
Another type of hosting available is dedicated hosting, which offers an entire
server dedicated to your use and is far more expensive due to its exclusivity.
By having the sole resource of the server, customers can receive a faster,
more efficient service that offers more security and can be customised to suit
individual needs. But managing a dedicated server requires a sophisticated
understanding of the technologies involved and is an advanced solution that
can cost you well in excess of $250 per month.
Hardware facilities from a web hosting provider are typically housed in data
centres, and include the network connection and an area referred to as 'redundancy' – this
is a back-up system.
What happens if there is a power cut at a data centre? Unless it has multiple
points of redundancy such as an uninterruptible power supply and a power generator
that will take it through such an event, then your server and thus your website
will go offline. Redundancy is equally important for disk drives, network connections
and air-cooling systems.
A good rule of thumb is that if a web hosting company does not explicitly discuss
their data centre and what it offers, you should avoid them.
Choosing the Right Service Provider
When choosing your service provider, ensure they offer the services provided below.- Speed: Remember you are selecting a business partner as well as a service provider. Ensure they're dedicated to maximising the effectiveness of and online performance of your site or multiple sites. It's important your website maintains a consistent speed/ performance, particularly during peak activity periods. This is when may potential customers are trying to access your virtual business.
- Location: Does it matter where your web hosting is located? Absolutely. Bandwidth in the US is much cheaper than that in Australia, enabling US hosting companies to offer hosting at highly competitive prices. However, with servers in the other side of the world there can be speed issues (known as latency) that can result in your website being delivered slower. Technical support can often be problematic when a US office is closed during Australian business hours. Even though a hosting company presents itself as Australian, if their data centre is in Florida you'll experience the same issues. To be sure, look for Australian hosting providers with high quality Australian data centres.
- Customer Support: It's important that your service provider has technical support staff dedicated to addressing any question or concern you may have, while also assisting you in configuring your services so that you get the maximum benefit out of all the features that come with your package. Be aware that a developed support infrastructure can have quite an impact on the cost of service provision.
- Range of Services: Choose a provider whose web hosting packages
are scalable, facilitating the potential growth of your business needs. Businesses
can start with a basic package and as your web presence grows, you can upgrade
easily to more comprehensive packages such as eCommerce.