Hosting Options – Introduction
Do you need a website? What do you know about your hosting options? Where is your site going to be hosted? How many other web sites will be hosted on the same machine? Why does it matter?
If you have a website, do you know what type of hosting account you have? Do you know the advantages and disadvantages of each type of account? If not, read on. I’ll be providing an introduction to hosting options in this and the next several posts.
Web Hosting Options:
Shared Hosting
This is the economy hosting option and therefore the most popular. If you setup your own site from one of the many hosting providers on the web, it is likely it is a shared hosting account.
Shared hosting means that the computer running your website is also running many other websites. To the outside world, each site appears to be independent. (The tech jargon for this is each site is running in a virtual host). Internally, you are sharing the hardware and software of a single box (computer) with many other users. The really big advantage is this keeps your costs down.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
You’ve heard of virtualization? Of course. Virtual machines are software emulating another computer – one operating system running inside of another one. VPS is running a server operating system inside another computer.
You still share physical computer resources with other users when you have a Virtual Server. But your software is isolated from the other Virtual Servers running on the same physical box where your VPS is located. This option is more expensive that Shared Hosting but it gives you more control of what you are able to run on your server.
Dedicated Server
The user interface you see when interacting with a Virtual Server may not look much different than what you’d see with a dedicated server. After all the point of virtualization is to make it appear you are on real computer, not just a software program pretending to be a computer. But you aren’t sharing any resources with anyone when you have a dedicated server. If you have a need for the best performance you can get from a single server, you may want your own dedicated server.
Server Farm
Feel lucky if you need a server farm. It means you have so many visitors, serving up so many web pages that a single computer cannot handle the load. Examples of companies that run on server farms are Amazon and Wikipedia.
A server farm is simply a collection of computers, each sharing the load in serving up your web pages. If you need a server farm, you’ve moved beyond the capabilities of most of the well known hosting providers.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is one of the newest options. It has some of the advantages of virtualization and of server farms. Economically, it has the advantages that you only pay for what you use. Another advanatage is that cloud computing scales easily. You don’t need to move to a new hosting provider or get a server farm when you’ve site becomes popular.
Amazon is a provider of cloud computing power through their S3 service. Most companies offering cloud computing capabilities are using the excess capacity they have from their other operations and selling that capacity to you.
In-house server with a web connection
Many businesses have their own IT department and their own servers. If these are on the internet, as many are, then you can use them run your own web servers. You can decide whether it is dedicated to serving web pages or whether other applications will run on the same machine. You don’t need a hosting company.
Private, internal server on LAN
Sometimes you don’t need to be on the internet. A small to medium business might need an intranet website to manage a wiki as a company knowledgebase. Or maybe you need company calendars, or a CRM system, for internal use only. You can run an internal website on one of your company’s servers and everyone in the office can access it using their browser.
Web server running on your computer (localhost)
The final options is to run a web server on your own computer. One reason to do this is because you want to run one or more web based applications. No one needs access to them but yourself. You can do this. A webserver is just another computer program.
Another reason to this is to evaluate web applications you might want for the rest of your company. And if you have the ability, you can run your own server to prototype changes you want to make to the company website.
I’ll go into some advanatages and disadvantages of these options in coming posts.
