All About Web Hosting

Just a quick bit that may be helpful to someone out there… If you have a linux-based web hosting plan and SSH access, you have a very powerful tool at your command! We’re talking many times more useful than simple FTP.

For example, say you need to update your site, but you’re not sure which files have the bit of text you need. Let’s say it’s an out of date copyright line in a footer – try this:

grep -rl ‘copy 2007” *

Which will list all files that have that “copy 2007″ text in them, in all directories from the current one on down. Or perhaps you need to securely copy a lot of files from one website to another. Of course you could downlod them all from site1 to your local machine, then upload them all to site2… But isn’t that kind of a waste when you could directly from site1 to site2? Heck, the internet connections between the two servers are probably faster than your local connection also. Try using scp to copy files. This command will recurisvely (i.e. get all the subdirectories) copy from site1 to site2:

scp -r ./* site@site.com:~/site2/path/to/desination/

It’s as easy as that! Don’t let the fact that these commands seem arcane or complicated, there’s tons of other examples out there on the web – just do some googling!

Saw this linked from Slashdot – how to make a card-sized web server – pretty cool! Not sure what you’d do with it, and it makes you wonder how much traffic it could handle… And how it would scale – would a large number of these actually be more power/cost/space efficient than a “normal” web server?
And of course, you’d need somewhere to put them… If you’re in the market for colocation space in the Midwest, EliteRAX has great rates on Michigan colocation services in their Detroit-area data center.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the data center when it comes to web hosting. After all, it’s the foundation that any web hosting services offered by a company are based on. It is a major piece of the whatever uptime the data center can provide, as well as a big piece of the overall security of any equipment used by a web hosting business.

A good data center requires a number of elements:

• Redundant power, with a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to provide power until the generator comes online – after all, the hardware is useless with out power!
• Redundant high speed network connections – with the ability to reroute traffic in case of network problems
• Redundant cooling – it can be surprising just how much heat can be pumped out by a rack of servers, and heat is the enemy of computer systems.
• Physical security – key card entry, CC cameras, etc.
• Fire suppression systems – in case of an emergency, these will help to minimize damage and downtime.

Another important thing to look for is the ownership of the data center. If a hosting company does not own their own data center, they are to some extent at the whim of whomever they’re renting space from. How can you guarantee uptime when you do not control the physical resources that your web servers need to keep running?

High Availability is a term used in the web hosting industry to refer to a website’s ability to stay online – no matter what. This means that whether it’s a power outage, a hardware failure, or just a huge increase in traffic to a popular website – the server stays up and the website stays “available” to the users.

Obviously this is critically important for online businesses. Every moment of downtime costs an ecommerce website money. But even if your site is not doing business, being offline means losing potential visitors. And visitors are everything to a website – otherwise, what’s the point of having a website?

Load balanced server clusters use “load balancing” to ensure high availability. In other words, incoming traffic is split between all of the servers in the cluster, according to each’s capabilities. And more machines can be added to a cluster to expand it to deal with spikes in traffic.

Additionally, if a server in a cluster goes offline due to hardware failure or other issues, the other servers in the cluster step in to take up the slack, ensure that the website remains available even while the offline server is brought back to service. Similarly, a cluster also helps prevent downtime due to server’s being offline for critical maintenance – each machine can be serviced individually while the remain online – and the website remains unaffected.