When you first start thinking about building your first web site you are faced with a lot of choices. You need to choose a domain name, but also somebody to register that domain name. You need to decide on whether you'll use a CMS tool like Joomla or a blog engine like Wordpress, or maybe you'll purchase a nice template and use that. One of the biggest choices you'll need to make is your hosting service. The right hosting service can be the difference between spending time installing and configuring your site and spending time adding content.
Once you've chosen your hosting service you will be asking yourself one more important question. Do I choose shared hosting or dedicated hosting? There is not an easy one or the other answer to that question. In fact I'm having trouble even phrasing it generically so that you can size up your situation and decide, but I'll lay down a few rules and gotcha's and see where we end up.
On the surface shared hosting seems like a great deal. For instance from Go Daddy you can get shared hosting plan for just $3.99 a month. The plan will give you 5GB of disk space and 250GB bandwidth. For a little more, $6.99 you get 100GB disk and 1000 GB bandwidth. Now, I just used Go Daddy as an example, but Host Gator and others are similar, some with slightly higher prices and some with slightly lower, but all have the same rules.
Hidden somewhere in your shared hosting agreement there will be a clause about not hogging system resources. What that means is that even if your site is not busy 99% of the time, if you get a big spike they have the right to shut you down. You see, the factor to be concerned with is not bandwidth or disk storage, it's CPU cycles. It's not average CPU cycles over the month, if you spike even for a short time all hosting services will shut down your shared account.
How do I know about the shared host shutdown? It happened twice to me. I'm not complaining, that's the price of having a successful web site while paying for bargain basement hosting. In my one case I got shut down because I had 8000 hits in about an hour. My daily average was about 500 hits. It seems that the blog engine I was using was using too much CPU time on my shared host, so they shut me down. Okay, so you're thinking that you can go shared and when you get to around 7000 then you can switch over to dedicated. Maybe that'll work, but in another case I was shut down with just 346 hits. Now for the 346 hit case my host sent me the log file and to my eyes it didn't seem that I was using much CPU at all. It showed my account using 100% CPU for .2 seconds. It also showed (in another case) my process taking 29 seconds, but using 0% CPU. I believe this was a case of mistaken identity. They saw that their server was slow and looked for long running processes, but didn't look at actual cycles taken. The long wait by the way was because of a YouTube vid running on my site.
So, after a full year on two shared hosting accounts, from two different companies, it was time to try my hand at dedicated hosting. One thing you must know about dedicated hosting is that you are running and responsible for all aspects of the box. That means that you are "root". There is nobody else monitoring for hung processes, nobody else installing software for you, but the best part is nobody kicking you off for using too much CPU for 10 seconds of the month.
My shared hosting accounts were $6.99 and $10 (total of $17/month). My new dedicated hosting account started at $79/month, but I bumped up the memory and CPU on the box and the final price is $111/month. That's a huge difference when you're just starting out, and over the first year I've saved $1200 going that way, but now I feel to move forward with my web sites I need the freedom that dedicated hosting allows. Freedom to have a busy day, freedom to be successful.
I don't want to make you shy away from shared hosting when you're just starting out. It's a great way to get your feet wet, establish a proof of concept and build your knowledge while keeping your budget low. Many small businesses or personal pages may never need more than a shared hosting account. For me, one year on shared hosting gave my little business enough time to grow enough for me to justify paying for dedicated hosting.
As a closing note, my ongoing move from my shared hosting accounts to my dedicated hosting account has taken about two weeks. The first couple of days was experimenting and learning, followed by a few days moving my best performing sites over and the last week has been spent moving the rest of my web sites over, cleaning up security and doing more learning. In the end, I chose Go Daddy as my dedicated host. I figured they deserved it, at least when they shut me down at 8000 hits it was conceivable that I was over stressing my shared account. As for the other company, the one who shut me down with the log file which proved nothing at 350 hits, sometimes you only get one mistake and in the web business when your site is having it's best day ever and your host shuts you down without good reason, it's time to move on.
Dedicated Hosting Server Server
For all the hype, over the last few years an increasing number of businesses have started moving not just distribution but more important business processes online in earnest. The main reason this much anticipated migration has dragged its heels is that change takes time, and businesses going online are faced with hurdles of cost, complexity, resourcing, and marketing at every step of the process.
The workhorse in terms of infrastructure of this fundamental change is hosting.
As many businesses now know, hosting has a wide range of options in terms of cost and function, but it's the growth of Dedicated Hosting that has continued to gather momentum over recent years. The most interesting aspect of this growth is that indicators show that most businesses are at the bottom of the adoption curve and that the most aggressive growth is yet to come.
What customers want
What customers have wanted, but more importantly needed, over the past years has changed considerably. As businesses become leaner and headcounts shrink, so priorities and their drivers have changed. So-called "Have-to-haves" or essential requirements are the issues ones getting any traction, relegating "Nice-to-haves" to the back-burner until they either become irrelevant or are escalated for other reasons.
This phenomenon has seen companies spend less time, resources and money on their online presence than they might have.
Priorities have changed.
Issues that have re-prioritised the importance and investment in online presence and tools now include better brand awareness through greater exposure, increased distribution driving higher sales and new markets, and better processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
As customers realise that their commitment to their online tools needs to increase, so too does their requirement for effective development.
Once the development has been defined and is nearing completion, the tool requires a means of delivery, being effective hosting.
Hosting is then divided into two categories: Shared hosting (otherwise known as virtual hosting, as opposed to virtualised hosting) and dedicated hosting.
Dedicated hosting is a requirement once the environment that the developer requires becomes either more complex. or more customised than a vanilla shared hosting environment.
In short, custom development requires the freedom that only a dedicated hosting environment can deliver.
How service providers are meeting customers? needs
Dedicated hosting has traditionally been delivered by Carriers, Internet Service Providers or Hosting Providers. Of these, it has quickly become apparent that hosting, particularly dedicated hosting, is a specialisation requiring specific skills to deliver the required product offerings.
As dedicated hosting growth gathers momentum, so too does the need for fast, cost effective delivery. Until recently, delivering dedicated hosting has meant a long-winded and complex process for both service provider and customer alike, involving specifying and sourcing the right hardware, burn testing, server OS configuration, application configuration, IDC installation and connectivity configuration and finally a handover to the customer to, only then, start the process of final configuration for production rollout.
The process is long-winded, expensive and complex for all parties concerned.
Issues continue for dedicated hosting servers set up this way as, when the times to upgrade disk, RAM or even the whole server, the process begins again from the start.
Virtualisation: Not as good as, better.
New virtualization technology is now set to deliver dedicated hosting in a way that not only eliminates most of the complexity for both service provider and customer alike, but introduces many additional virtualised hosting benefits that have not previously existed.
For service providers, it allows scalable, profitable and fast delivery of premium dedicated hosting.
For customers, it eliminates hardware, hardware drivers and hardware upgrades. In addition, due to the features included in some server virtualisation technology, it delivers far higher levels of availability and allows clones of production environments to be created for seamless development and rollout.
Virtualisation and virtualisation
As either a service provider or a customer, it's important to understand that many different flavours of server virtualisation exist, bringing different price points, levels of resource control and base-OS independence.
Apart from resource control and allocation, stability of, and independence from, the underlying OS is essential to realising all the available benefits of server virtualisation technology and quality virtualised hosting.
Of all the current crop of server virtualisation technology, VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 seems to lead the market against all of the above criteria, combining the highest available resource control with elimination of hardware drivers. Infrastructure 3 also allows intelligent high-availability redistribution of VMs from failed physical servers to the remaining healthy servers in the farm.
Server virtualisation technology is set to expand its market share as it has in the wider server market ? it just depends on whether virtualised hosting service providers and customers alike realise the possibilities available for premium virtualised hosting.
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Jon Murray has sinced written about articles on various topics from Games, Martial Arts and Halloween Costumes. Jon runs a number of web sites from one dedicated hosting account including Halloween Village, featuring and Project Adsense at. Jon Murray's top article generates over 1000000 views. to your Favourites.
Lorenzo Modesto has sinced written about articles on various topics from web development, Web Development and Site Promotion. Lorenzo Modesto started in the Internet industry in 1996 and has held executive positions in sales, marketing and business development. He is a Director of Bulletproof networks that specialise in. Lorenzo Modesto's top article generates over 2400 views. to your Favourites.
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