TYPES OF HOSTING ACCOUNTS

As you have noticed as you’ve read through this chapter, when it comes to web-hosting services, one size does not fit all. The same goes for the type of account you opt for with one of these services.

Virtual Hosting

Most small e-commerce websites should consider “virtual serving.” This type of hosting service lets you run your website as if you had your own in-house web server but with the advantage of the web-hosting service’s pipeline to the Internet. Virtual serving just divides a server’s capacity into several distinct “virtual” web servers. With this set up a hosting service can host several sites on one computer. This type of service also allows you to load your own software, set up your own cgi-bin directories, etc.

Most Internet hosting companies offer several varieties of “virtual serving.” If you require a more powerful server or a server with a limited number of sites sharing it or a combination of both, you can get it (for an appropriate fee). You are only limited by what hardware configuration and bandwidth you can afford.

Your Own Dedicated Server

Another option for a small e-commerce site that has heavy traffic, needs high availability, or serves dynamically generated pages is to contract for a dedicated server. With a dedicated server contract, instead of sharing a server, you run your website on one of the web-host’s servers, which is configured for, and dedicated to, your website’s needs. This lets you take advantage of the web-hosting service’s high-speed connection to the Internet, technical support, and redundancy systems, but allows you to have, at your command, the full capacity of an individual server.

A dedicated server is the right option if a virtual hosting service plan doesn’t offer enough data transfer, disk space, CPU power, and/or flexibility. With a dedicated server your website has the whole server to itself. That means high data transfer limits, hard drives with gigabytes of free space, 100% of the CPU power, root access, and the ability to run whatever programs you wish.

Dedicated servers usually come preloaded with an operating system, web server software, control panel, and some basic services. Anything else to be loaded onto the server is up to you. Most dedicated servers are rented by the month and pricing usually includes a monthly bandwidth limit and at least one IP static address.

The downside of this choice is that the cost of running your website on a dedicated hosted server can be significantly higher than using a virtual server. Also, you need to know how to manage a server. That includes monitoring, installing and upgrading programs, configuring programs, dealing with hack attempts, troubleshooting and fixing problems, etc. Or you could hire an experienced system administrator to handle such tasks.

Another option is to let the web-hosting service provide your server management needs. For an extra fee you can get a managed dedicated server — many Internet hosting companies offer leases for individual computers with the same management options as a virtual hosting contract.

Co-hosting or Co-locating

A large website might go with co-hosting (which is also referred to as co-locating) since it provides the most freedom — but it is expensive. With co-hosting you rent space in an Internet hosting service’s network server cabinet and pay to access the network that’s connected to the Internet. In this situation you put your own computers in the server cabinet and service them yourself by obtaining access to the hosting facilities. This arrangement usually includes, for a fee, some kind of limited maintenance and back-up service.

Basic Server Farm

A basic server farm usually consists of several separate servers performing different functions — all residing in one server cabinet. A large website running various applications should separate the various server applications over different computers, some sharing tasks and others going it alone. It’s good practice, for example, to put a processor-intensive application on a single server and to isolate any risky tasks. See Chapter 4 for discussion of hardware configurations.