All About Web Hosting

Most people are familiar with the what’s generally called “shared hosting” – whereby multiple clients share the resources of a single web server. This approach has a lot going for it – it allows for inexpensive web hosting because the costs of the server can be split among many clients – requiring each to pay less.

But shared hosting also has some problems. For one, the separation between clients on the same server is not extensive – while hosts do a lot to try to keep problems with one clients website from affecting others on the same server, when resources are shared, this is difficult. Furthermore, there can be problems rising from needs for specialized software configurations – for example some clients need PHP4, and some need PHP5 for their website… and the server can only have one version installed at a time.

The traditional solution to this problem was to go up to a dedicated server, where a server is only used by a single client. This makes for better security, performance, etc. It also means that the costs of the server must be borne by that one client – making dedicated hosting plans more expensive than is feasible for some clients.

Thankfully developments in virtualization technology have made a third option ever more useful. A virtual server is a server that runs on a “virtual machine” – a virtual version of a computer existing within the resources of a real physical machine. This virtual machine can be configured in all the ways that a “real” computer can be, and as far as the software running on it is concerned, it is a real machine.

Software like VMWare and Xen allow hosts to set up their servers to host multiple virtual machines – and these machines then can act as virtual dedicated servers for clients. Thus, the cost of the physical machine is split among the clients whose virtual servers are hosted there. The clients gain many of the benefits of a “real” dedicated server (stability, flexibility, security, performance) while still only paying a fraction of the cost of the actual computer.

This is especially helpful for ecommerce hosting, as ecommerce sites generally require greater security and often also need specialized ecommerce software like Magento which is difficult to set up on a shared hosting plan. By using a virtual server they can “start small” and not need a dedicated server right off the bat.

There’s got to to be thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of web hosting operations out there. Things like reseller hosting make it easy for pretty much anyone to set up shop and host a few small sites. And there’s nothing wrong with that, in general.

But as with anything, you’ll tend to get some fly-by-night operations, and if you’re looking around for somewhere to host an important site, be sure not to get stung! One thing about the web, it’s relatively easy for someone to put up a website, and a good website can make an operationg look legit when it really isn’t!

So here some things to watch out for when checking out a potential host!

• Overselling – A problem that is epidemic in the business, this is promising far, far more than is reasonable for a hosting plan, basically taking advantage of user’s ignorance as to what is realistic pricing. For example, offer 5000 gigabytes of disk space on a plan that costs less that $10 – there’s no way a legitimate hosting provider could offer that, while storage space is cheap – it’s not that cheap! Customers of such plans will find that shut down if they actually try to use that much space…
• No data center – A data center is crucial for reliable web hosting. Sure, anyone with a little networking know-how can hook up a machine in their basement and host a site. But to host a site with 99% uptime and that’s capable of dealing with high traffic levels, you need a data center. If the hosting provider you’re checking out says nothing about their data center, that’s not a good sign!
• Support promises – Quality hosts put a lot of resources into their support staff. If a host’s site doesn’t at least give you some idea of what levels of support you can expect, that’s a warning sign. If they have no support at all (or it’s just the owner) – or if they’ve outsourced their support, that’s another warning sign!
• Web buzz – Do a google search on the host’s name. What comes up? Do they have a lot of “hosted by” type entries? That’s a good sign, it means they have a lot of sites hosted. Do you find good or bad reviews? Take everything with a grain of salt, after all most reviews you see have little or no checking of authenticity – there’s nothing to stop someone from writing fake reviews (good or bad!) about a web hosting company. But it’ll still give you at least some idea of what customers think about the company.

So do your research – a little effort up front can save you a lot of hassle down the road!

I do nearly all my coding in vim – other than the occasional use of textpad when I don’t have ssh access to a website… I like vim because I prefer working on the server – everything’s there, and there’s no time wasted uploading/download, etc. And you can also use things like grep to help you get things done.

Two of the handiest features in vim are buffers and macros. (Are there such thing as freudian typos? I keep mis-typing “buffers” as “buggers”… lol). Buffers allow you to quickly pull text into a little spot in memory – it’s like the clipboard that every (modern) OS has, except that you have a lot of them available. Basically you assign a letter (or number I think) to the buffer, and copy/paste using that. This vim buffer example has more info.

Macros are even handier, in my opinion – especially when used in conjunction with buffers. Basically, they record all your key strokes, and since vim is a console program, that means a macro records everything. With some clever use of searching, etc you can use a macro to automate just about any repetitive task you can imagine.  Here’s some great vim macro examples.