Web Hosting

An Introduction What is Web Hosting

1. What is web hosting?
Web hosting simply means internet hosting that enables businesses and individuals to make their online presence in the form of a website, accessible to the public via internet. A website needs two things to be hosted or to become accessible to everyone: Web space: Website files, HTML codes, images and everything else is stored in this space. The heavier your website, the more is the space you require to store its content.
Bandwidth: In the web hosting industry, bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred to and from a server or a website.
It is the allotted internet bandwidth that makes a website accessible to everyone online. The more the bandwidth, the better and faster is your network, connection and system. Bandwidth requirement is directly proportional to the number of visitors who visit a site. The more the number of visitors, the more is the bandwidth that is required. The requirement of space and bandwidth is fulfilled by a web hosting provider. However,in addition to these two, the hosting provider also maintains the server, ensures website uptime and provides data security.

2. Types of hosting: Depending upon your web space and bandwidth requirements, you can purchase the required hosting from three basic types of hosting available: Shared Hosting: In this hosting, multiple accounts are hosted on the same server and the resources are also shared among them. It is best for small businesses, whose websites have low to moderate traffic and CPU needs. It is like an apartment building, where you need to pay less amount, but you share the space with many other people. You also get affected if your neighbor decides to party as he and his visitors may create disturbance for you or may use up your parking space. Similarly, in shared hosting, if one user uses more bandwidth in case his site has more traffic, then your site may go down.
3. Dedicated Server: In this hosting, the owner has the complete server and all the resources exclusively for himself. However, the convenience and solitude makes it the costliest option in hosting. It is ideal for large enterprises and those organizations, whose websites have heavy traffic and CPU needs. It is like having your own home where you can live according to your convenience, but you will also have to bear the costs for its purchase and maintenance alone. Similarly, in dedicated hosting, you will have to pay more than any other type of hosting for availing server, bandwidth and resources all by yourself.
4. VPS Hosting: In this hosting, virtualization technology is used to partition a computer virtually into multiple servers. No physical partition is there, but because of virtual or software partition, each user is given much more privacy and security as compared to the shared hosting.
It is like living in a comfortable condo, where you get your own privacy, fewer neighbors and better space but you still share your walls and plot with others. The price for added space is obviously more than apartment housing, but is not as exorbitant as the cost of having your own home. Similarly, in VPS, you are less affected with busy websites and the cost is more than shared hosting and lesser than dedicated hosting.
VPS hosting also gives you the freedom to install whatever you want on the server. You can try any new programming language or deploy a custom Apache module. As you have the root access, you can make any changes using the remote desktop command line or remote desktop. VPS hosting offers many more advantages than shared hosting and almost the same advantages as dedicated hosting. But in terms of price, VPS hosting is less expensive than dedicated hosting but more expensive than shared hosting.

How do I choose the best hosting company?
When choosing a hosting company, there are certain ingredients that can make the difference between online success and an internet disaster. Do you want to be able to contact your hosting company at 10pm if your site and email develop problems?

Do you know how secure and stable the providers hosting setup is? Do you want to deal with someone who speaks English instead of technical jargon? There are a number of small hosting businesses set up in garages and basements or with limited staff resources. They may be cheaper, but the smaller the company, the fewer resources they have available to provide adequate customer support or servicing when you need it. It is not unknown for websites to go down only to discover that the person responsible for fixing the server is on holiday or otherwise unavailable. Every time your website is down, your business loses money, so compromises on hosting prices can cost you in other ways. The most reliable hosting companies provide dedicated customer support and technical services, capable of dealing with your issues day and night.
If your website goes offline, you don’t want to wait a couple of days before discovering the problem as you want to be sure your provider will identify and correct the issue before you even know about it. Also, although it is possible to host your website anywhere in the world, choosing a local hosting company can have greater advantages. Dealing with a hosting company in the United States can be frustrating.
Long distance calls are expensive and email support can often be slow and unhelpful outside of US business hours. If your website is suffering costly delays during Australian business hours, you don’t want to wait for New York to wake up before it can be fixed. A reputable hosting provider should have enough back-up safeguards to ensure your website never goes down (well, at least 99.99% of the time).
The last thing you want is the server with your website on it floating through a flooded building with no appropriate back-up stored high-and-dry elsewhere. The same goes for the connections to the web. If the local road works chop through a Telstra cable, wouldn’t you feel better knowing your server was also linked to the net through at least one or two other connections, providing uninterrupted service? Make sure you know how your provider can guarantee your online store will remain open for business 24x7.
Net registry houses servers in the largest data centre in the southern hemisphere, Global Switch in Pyrmont, as well as the E3 data centre in Alexandria, providing reliable, secure, and above all, local hosting. How much uptime is good enough? The last thing your website needs is downtime, which is why many hosting providers offer uptime guarantees. But how much is good enough? The difference between 99.5% and 99.9% uptime might not seem very much, but actually equates to 42.9 hours of your website being unavailable to customers each year.
That is nearly two days of forced closure with no sales and no money coming in. Therefore, 0.4% of difference can cost your business a lot more than you may think. What do I need to consider when choosing a hosting package? There are a number of factors to consider when deciding on the best value hosting solution for your website. It is important to not only understand your current goals, but have an idea for how the website is likely to evolve.
In choosing a hosting plan, there are a few key considerations. Data storage, data transfer, bandwidth, databases and scripting technology. Most hosting accounts come equipped with features such as email. Even so, there are some that consider email an added extra for a fee. Check for the features you need beforehand so you have a clear idea of the total cost of the package. How much data storage is necessary? Most hosting plans contain more than enough data storage for the majority of websites.
But certain files take up more space than others. Lots of image, video or audio files can chew up storage space quickly. It is possible to reduce the size of many large files, so it is worth working with someone with the technical ability to compress the amount of data without compromising quality. If your website is likely to grow over time, this needs to be accounted for.
An extreme example would be a site like YouTube, needing to find storage for thousands of large video files every day. You will probably never be faced with that kind of growth, but even a few large files added regularly over time can soon eat up your storage space. Alternatively, simple text pages with only a few small images take relatively little storage space. You may be able to add hundreds of these pages before filling the space taken by a handful of audio or video files. Where in the world is your web server? Do you know where your hosting company is storing your data? Most Australian hosting is actually stored offshore, although you wouldn’t know it. Storing your website overseas can also impact your website by being slower and being less responsive.
Net registry is 100% Australian owned and run, with the entire hosting infrastructure located and maintained in Sydney. What is bandwidth? Bandwidth is the are that connects your website to the internet. It is a measure of the amount of digital information that can be accessed within a given time period.
For example, if your main webpage is 300 kilobytes in size, then every time a web browser accesses it, 300kb of data travels down the ‘pipe’. How fast this data is transferred depends on how many people are accessing data down the pipe at the same time and how large your pipe is. Larger files, such as audio and video, eat up bandwidth just as they eat up data storage.
Putting a lot of large files in your website can clog the flow of data through the are and make your website much slower to load in a visitors browser if a lot of people access that content at once. Even with small files, your bandwidth can still become bottle-necked. If your data connection can cope with a certain amount of data transfer per second, but the number of people trying to access your website exceeds this, it can also cause a traffic jam. With the data not getting through fast enough, website visitors can receive are timed out error messages instead of your wonderful webpage. If too much traffic tries to access data through this connection at the same time, it is possible to crash the server, putting your website offline until the problem can be fixed. This can make some websites a victim of their own success, with their website becoming inaccessible when they are at their most popular.
If you are expecting a large spike in traffic or an increase in large files, it is worth talking to your web host about bandwidth solutions. This could mean a transfer to a different plan or short term strategies such as website mirrors (a duplicate of the website on a separate hosting server). What is clustered hosting? Hosting usually requires websites to share server space on the one unit, but imagine how upset you would be if the actions of one website impacted on the performance of your business because it shares the same server.
If a website receives too much traffic or overloads (crashes) the server through increased activity, it affects everything stored in the same place. Clustered hosting spreads the load across multiple machines so that no one website can affect any other. This allows for a far more secure and stable hosting environment with fewer risks. Always choose a hosting provider that offers clustered hosting to be sure that your website remains operating at its best.

Should I worry about data transfer limits?
Hosting accounts usually have a data transfer limit. This is the amount of data the hosting package can provide to the internet within the given time period (usually a month). This is similar to you home internet account,
for example, where you pay so much for your connection with a fixed download limit. If you go over your monthly limit, depending on your provider, you may find your internet speed throttled to a crawl or be charged extra for every additional megabyte of data. If either of these outcomes happened to your website, it is not an ideal outcome. Your website could become slow to load or you could receive a larger bill to pay for the extra data transfer. Thankfully, you don’t need to worry. All Netregistry hosting accounts have unlimited data transfer, no throttling and no additional data fees.
What is database technology?
More and more websites now allow visitors to interact and manipulate information on the webpage. This may be by entering and registering their information, performing searches to be presented with a page of specific results, or entering comments into a blog or forum, to mention just three examples. These websites are called are dynamic, and use database technology to store information in sections that can be reassembled into fresh webpages in answer to the visitor request. Classic examples of dynamic websites are blogs, eBay or any site that allows a user to sign in and create a profile. Also, any website that uses a content management system or shopping cart works in the same way. If you plan to include any of these features on your website, you will need to check for database technology on your hosting server.
An example is Netregistrys Business Hosting, providing the most commonly used database features for small business. The database is also bounded by storage limits, and it is worth knowing what these are before planning a complex website. If you don’t plan to use any dynamic features, you may only need basic are statichosting, such as Netregistrys Economy Hosting package, saving you money. Of course, if at any time you decide to develop the features on your website, it is possible to upgrade your hosting plan to the correct configuration. What is Scripting? The most common language used to code web pages is called HyperText Markup Language (HTML).
This code tells a web browser how to display the webpage. But when creating dynamic webpages, some additional scripting languages are needed to tell the web browser where to access the information needed to construct the elements on the page. Because your hosting server will need to interpret these scripts to provide the correct responses from the database, you need to be sure it has been configured with the relevant languages.

Common scripting languages are PHP, Perl, ASP, etc. Unless you are building the website yourself, it is unlikely you will need to know anything about these languages. Your web designer will be able to tell you which particular scripts to look for when choosing a hosting package, but most hosting servers with database technology support the majority of commonly used scripts. Where can I get more advice? You may now understand some of the basics, but relating them to your specific situation can sometimes require experience and further knowledge. If you are still unsure how to choose the best hosting plan for your website, the Net registry sales team is trained in determining your specific needs. The best hosting plan is one that doesn’t require regular attention or additional monthly fees, but can cope with the daily demands of your website without complaint. By addressing the key principles, you can ask the right questions of your hosting provider and give your website the best platform to reach your audience.
Net registry has been providing strong hosting advice and solutions to Australian businesses since 1997. With static, dynamic and e-commerce hosting solutions available, Net registry can provide the reliability and features you need to form the foundations for your new online empire.