Some Truths about Web Hosting

Web site performance and availability depend as much on who hosts the site and where it's hosted as on brilliant coding. In the last few years, hundreds of businesses have sprouted up that offer inexpensive Web hosting, but many of them do not guarantee uptime or specific service levels. When you're designing a new Web application, you should consider the hosting question in the early design stages.

For a highly available Web site, the choice of host is important. The host can provide many features, including Internet connectivity, redundant power, backup generators, disaster recovery, on-demand bandwidth, and managed services that guarantee a 99.99 percent or greater uptime. An uptime percentage of 99.99 translates to roughly an hour of downtime per year. Choose a hosting provider that will not only guarantee this uptime but also provide some sort of reparation to you in the event that the provider fails to meet this agreement.

NOTE

Always choose a hosting provider that can implement an explicit service-level agreement (SLA) indicating how responsive they will be in the event of every type of site outage. Without an SLA, it's not clear whether you or the hosting provider is responsible for recovering your application during a site outage.