The Importance of the 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?

What is “High Availability”?

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.

Four Reasons Why You Should Pick LAMP for Your Hosting

If you’re not sure, go LAMP. “LAMP” stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP (or Perl) – which are the most commonly used and supported set of technologies on web severs – operating system (some distribution of Linux), the Apache web server, the MySQL database and the PHP programming language. Not a web developer? Well, if you planning on running a website you should still be sure to go with LAMP hosting, even if you haven’t the faintest idea how to use a database or write PHP code. Here’s why:

1. Support
Since it’s the most common platform for building dynamic websites, there’s lots more web hosts offering it – and they probably understand it better than less common technologies like ColdFusion. Moreover, if you need to find a contractor to work on your site, you’ll have a much easier time if you’re using common technology.

2. Cost
All of the elements of a LAMP server are free – as in no charge, no licensing fees, nada. Whereas the nearest proprietary competitor (Microsoft’s IIS, Access database, ASP, etc.) is most definitely not free! So going with LAMP will likely save you some money on hosting charges.

3. Flexibility
Because the LAMP platform is so popular, there’s an enormous amount of software available for it. And much of it is free as well. Want a blog? WordPress and MovableType are both mainly used on LAMP servers. Content management systems such as Joomla and Mambo, as well as forum software like phpBB are also LAMP based. Running with LAMP gives you good odds of being able to easily add new functionality to your site in the future, often for free.

4. Ease of Maintenance
While perhaps not the easiest to use, linux based operating systems are superb in terms of ability to support remotely. In other words, because linux is built to work basically from a simple command line interface, a knowledgeable admin can run the server using just that – making it a snap to connect and fix problems without needing to be in the same physical location as the machine. While it’s possible to do this with Windows, you still need some sort of a VNC program to connect to it to it to be able to see the Windows, use the mouse, etc.

So if you’re reasearchng a hsot, and if you’re not sure whether to go Linux or Windows – the best choice is porbably to go LAMP!

THE best web hosting forum

Looking for a good forum that’s literally all about web hosting? Try www.webhostingtalk.com – it’s definitely the best I’ve found – very active, with tons of topics. Great place to research a potential host or ask for recommendations from other webmasters!

On Green Web Hosting

As the country becomes more sensitive to the issues of global warming and the environment, it’s likely that green web hosting is going to become an ever-larger niche in the web hosting market. To go “green” a web hosting company must attempt to become carbon neutral - and the biggest obstacle to this is power.

For a web hosting company, the vast majority of its environmental impact comes from the power that it must use to keep its computers running. Unlike a mining company or lumbering company, web hosts don’t have much of a direct impact on the environment, but as heavy users of power, they do have an impact.

Generally this can be mitigated in several ways. Perhaps the best and most obvious is through efficiency – after all if you use less power, the power saved does not have to be produced at all – and therefore has zero environmental impact. And it saves the web host money on their power bill!

But there’s only so much that can be done with efficiency. The next step for many web hosts is to buy carbon offsets to mitigate their carbon production. This usually takes the form of purchasing credits from other companies, etc.

Of course the last option then is to use renewable power – which could be as direct as setting up solar panels and wind turbines – but more often takes the form of enrolling in a special program with the local power company. For a fee, the web host is agreeing to use power created using renewable energy sources. This is a win-win, as the hosting company helps mitigate their environmental impact, and it encourages the power company to invest in renewable power sources!

Just what IS dedicated hosting?

First, some basics. We need to set up a good foundation for future posts, and so the first step is to define the basic types of web hosting.

Most webmasters are accustomed to using shared hosting.  Shared hosting involves many customers all using one machine. But while shared hosting plans are generally less expensive than dedicated servers, sometimes paying a bit more can have important benefits..

First, let us define what is meant by “dedicated server.” A dedicated server is a web server that is dedicated to the use of a single client. Therefore all of that server’s resources are put at the disposal of that one client. As a result dedicated hosting has some important advantages over shared hosting despite the price difference.
POWER: Dedicated servers are many times the only way to provide enough horsepower to deal with a popular website. Because a single user controls 100% of the server’s resources, they can be used more efficiently to handle traffic. But in a shared hosting scenario the server’s resources must be spread among the clients using it, and  some resources are wasted.

SECURITY: By its very nature, shared hosting is less secure than dedicated hosting. This is beacuse a shared server is nearly always being used by many unique users at once. Therefore there is no risk of security problems being caused by other users.

FLEXIBILITY: On a shared server, the server has to be configured for the lowest common denominator. Dedicated servers, on the other hand, can be tailored to the specifications of just one customer. This leads to increased reliability and performance, as well as being perfect for specific situations.

RELIABILITY: A dedicated server often has greater reliability than shared hosting. This is because there is just one user on the web server.  With shared hosting, one customer’s problems require the operator to restart the server – bringing down the sites of everyone else hosted on that machine this isn’t a problem with a dedicated server.

Although shared hosting may be more inexpensive – there’s still lots of additional factors to think about when settling on web hosting – a dedicated server may indeed be perfect for your needs!

Here we go!

Stay tuned for a wide variety of useful links, stories, news, etc – all from the exiting (?) world of web hosting!