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When you first create your website one of the big decisions you make is where will you host it, and how. It’s an important choice impacting the performance of your website for as long as you keep that hosting...
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Web hosting options explained: Part 1
When you first create your website one of the big decisions you make is where
will you host it, and how. It’s an important choice impacting the performance of
your website for as long as you keep that hosting (you can change later but it’s a
lot of work).
So what are the options and what are the major differences in the types of
hosting? There are three types of hosting:
Shared Dedicated Content Delivery Network
The two most commonly used for the bulk of websites are shared and dedicated. Whichever one you use, your website will reside on a server at the hosting company’s facility. In this first of three posts on web hosting options we’ll cover shared hosting. Shared hosting
In shared hosting, you share the server with many other websites – hence
the name. Using a technique called virtualisation, hosting companies are able
to run many different websites and applications on a single server. The benefit
of this is it makes hosting extremely affordable. Hardware, software, security and
maintenance cost a lot of money. If you share a server, then those costs are
divided up among everyone one who uses it. For just a few pounds a month,
you can get your website online and have most of the software available to
maintain it provided by the hosting company.
Beyond the low cost though, there isn’t any advantage to shared hosting. And there are several pitfalls. There’s a queue for one. Since multiple websites are sharing the same computer
resources, each has to take its turn in line to access them. For example, say you
share a server with an ecommerce store running an amazing sale that just went
viral over social media. Thousands of people are now visiting that website and
making purchases. Meanwhile you have visitors trying to access your site. What
do you think happens? Well, your visitor requests get in line with the
thousands trying to access the online store before the sale expires. Your
website will load more slowly (and so will the store’s website), and your
visitors may grow impatient and leave.
Such frenzy might be too much for the server, and it might crash. Everyone’s
website on that server will go down. Or maybe it isn’t a shopping spree, but an
innocent programmer working on his client’s site uploads and tries to run a
program that has a glitch. Then suddenly the server speed slows to a crawl
because it is spending all its resources running the faulty program. And though
most hosting companies have protections against this sort of thing, the bad
program could actually take the server offline.
Those are just two examples of how other people’s websites or activity on the shared host could affect your own website. Another issue could be that your
website is doing so well that you exceed the fair use policies in place for shared
servers. Many companies list this sort of restriction in the fine print, but it means
they have the right to shut your website down if it is causing problems for other
users (the aforementioned examples would also be subject to this rule). You may
be doing nothing wrong – just finally getting the traffic and attention you want
when the company decides you’re too big for shared hosting and takes your website offline.
Even without issues your site is guaranteed to go down regardless. Shared
hosting usually guarantees some level of uptime – less than 100%. For
example a 99.9% uptime corresponds to about 8.76 hours down per year. You
have no control over when this downtime may occur. If your site goes down for
longer than the agreed downtime, you may receive credit to your account, but
you can’t get back the visitors that couldn’t see your website.
If you’re not willing to take these risks, there is another alternative: dedicated
hosting, something that is especially useful when considering streaming or
hosting video content.