All About Web Hosting

You occasionally see offers for free web hosting, or people trying to find a decent free web host. I’ve never understood the point of free hosting. It boils down to this – why would you spend the time to find a free host, put up with whatever rigamarole they’re going to put you through for the free server, and then spend time building a site on that free host – if you’re going to do all this, why wouldn’t you take the step of just getting some cheap web hosting. Surely your time is worth more than the few bucks a month you save by using free hosting? To say nothing of the fact that such hosts are often insecure, unstable and unpredictable.

Seriously, if you’re thinking about this, think about why. If you’re unwilling to spend a few bucks a month to get actual hosting for your site, why are you spending time on it in the first place?

For a lot of webmasters, the speed at which their web host can serve a page is important, or even critical. Studies have found that many users will close their browser, or click to a different site if a website takes too long to display. So obviously this is an issue that should and does concern webmasters.

The problem is that there are many different elements involved in the display of a web page. First, a quick basic overview of the process.

1. The user clicks or enters a URL
2. The user’s browser connects to the server at that URL
3. The server does some “stuff” and returns a “page”
4. The user’s browser then opens connections and downloads any resources that are needed to display this page – such as images, javascript, css, etc.
5. The user’s browser renders the page.

Obviously the web server is a major part of the time involved in this process. However there are other factors that can cause a page to appear “slow” – even if the web host’s server is responding quickly.

A slow connection
If the user has a high latency connection (such as dial-up) – all of the steps that involve the user’s browser communicating with the web server will be slowed down significantly. Connection speed can be an issue even if the user has a fast connection, since the packets that make up the data being sent back and forth are routed all over the place – if the geographical distance between the user is very great, then it will take longer for those packets to arrive, even if both sender and receiver have “fat pipes.” This is one reason why companies often choose to colocate their equipment in data centers in different geographical regions.

Slow third party servers
If a web page makes use of resources from other web sites, this adds more time to the whole process, because the user’s browser must go out and get those resources from those external sites. This is often a problem with ads – if a site relies heavily on ads, each time a page loads those ads must be pulled from the ad company’s servers, which can slow things down.

Javascript, Flash, Java, etc.
The time that the user’s browser takes to render the page can be affected by the resources being used – for example javascript, flash and java all require more processing power to be parsed and displayed than simple html and images. Of course computer processors are always getting faster – but then websites are always making more use of these technologies also!

Improperly compressed images
This is a common problem when rookie webmasters or designers are involved – images that are way too big for their use on a site. We’ve all been to sites that show a photo at it’s original resolution, but “squeezed” down by changing its “width” parameter. This can make an enormous difference in load time – the user’s browser may need to go out and download a multi-megabyte image, rather than one that’s under 100k.

Many, many more
Of course there’s also many other reasons that may cause a slow page load – such as a computer slowed by viruses or malware, or a server that is being attacked by a denial of service, or poorly written code running on the server. We can’t cover them all here, but I wanted to show that there’s a lot of factors involved in a web page’s load time!

What to do?
Next post I’ll look at some of the ways to try to troubleshoot why a page is taking a long time to load.