Selecting the best Web Host, is one of the most crucial decisions the developer and clients have to make, to ensure better performance and cost effectiveness. There are 100s of hosting services available online with their own limitations and capacities. If it is not understood clearly, you will end up paying huge amounts of money, or even losing most of your customers due to inconvenience. Many organizations around the world, pay huge amounts of money for consultancy services, just to figure out a proper hosting service in order to cater to their needs. These consultancy services have experienced developers and advisers who are capable of tackling different kinds of scenarios presented by customers.
In one of my previous blogs, I talked about domain name registrations and how domain name systems work. This blog intends to provide a general understanding about Web Hosting and even provide some guidelines on how to pick your own web host. Following list is the outline of the blog.
What is Hosting
Self Hosting vs Professional Web Hosting
Three Main Types of Hosting
Hosting Specifications of Your Website or Web Application
1) What is Hosting
Hosting is the concept of making something available for someone. Similarly, web hosting is the concept of making a website available for the World Wide Web. Internet hosting is a service that runs internet servers, which allows organizations and individuals to serve content on the internet. Web hosting is a subsection of internet hosting. Web hosting is made possible via Web Hosts, who provide the infrastructure necessary for the hosting process.
In simple terms, a web host is a computer, that can host a website. But in reality, a web host is a bunch of specially configured computers called servers. Shown below are a set of servers.
So, if you understand this correctly, the entire world wide web is a network of all these servers. These servers are similar to our very own computers, But the major difference is that, the content on the servers are publicly available on the internet. Whenever you wish to view a website, what happens is, the server that contains the website will upload its contents, and your browser will download these contents. That means, servers are like basic computers that have Operating Systems like Linux or Windows, has a storage and a strong network connection with super fast up link speeds. The image given below shows what happens when an user is viewing a website.
HOST, is the organization that rents out the necessary hosting space to users, so that these users can HOST their own websites. So, the user is allowed to upload any file he/she wants, and the server is responsible for making that content publicly available to everyone on the internet.
Once you pay and rent hosting space from a web host, you will be allocated separate space and given an IP address, which the internet users can use to access your hosted content. Since these IP addresses are hard to remember, we created domain name systems. To know more please read my previous blog on domain names and domain name systems.
2) Self Hosting vs Professional Web Hosting
The obvious question that would come into your mind is, why can't I use my computer as a hosting service. Well, the fair answer would be yes, you can. But there are many limitations when it comes to Self hosting vs using a professional web hosting service. The following table will summarize the differences between the two approaches.
3) Three Main Types of Hosting
1) Shared Hosting
2) Dedicated Hosting
3) Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting
Shared Hosting
99.9 percent of the websites available today are considered to be small websites. The size of the website is determined by the number of visitors that visit your website every month. The concept of shared hosting is where a single server will be hosting many websites on it. Since it is a shared resource, it makes it cheaper for people to purchase these. On average, Shared Hosting can handle up to 30,000 visitors per month. The image below depicts the shared hosting concept.
Shared Hosting Pros
Price is very low
Easy to use
Shared Hosting Cons
If the server is overcrowded, resource sharing and performance may drop
Limited Storage and Bandwidth
Dedicated Hosting
Unlike shared hosting, dedicated hosting consists of a single server that hosts a single website. With a dedicated server for yourself, you know that the hosting machine can give you the best possible performance as needed. These dedicated systems are typically self-managed. So it gives the flexibility for the user to Since we are looking at a dedicated service, the cost is a bit high, and it can handle a traffic of up to 100,000 visitors per month.
Dedicated Hosting Pros
Flexibility to customize as you want
Enough storage and bandwidth
Performance will not be affected by any other websites
Dedicated Hosting Cons
Very high pricing tier
Self managed dedicated hosting servers need technical knowledge. (Or this can be handed over to the Hosting service where they will handle the technical aspects)
Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting
This is a complex concept when compared with the other two hosting approaches. In reality, VPS systems have thousands of computers networked together, so that it will appear as a single machine to the outer world. It will appear as a powerful machine with thousands of processors, unlimited hard disk space, terabytes of RAM etc. What the user does is, he/she will reserve a portion of this system for a monthly or yearly price.
The major advantage of having this over dedicated servers is that you can simply scale from a smaller website to a larger website without having to move from server to server. With this big virtual computer, sometimes a server is sectioned off into small servers, (similar to shared hosting) which allows multiple users on the same server. But this sharing is very low when compared to shared hosting and this is different from dedicated hosting where the user requires a technical knowledge to set up the servers.
So, it is basically like having a virtual, but private serve for each user.
VPS Hosting Pros
Allows us to customize the server setup
Cheaper than dedicated hosting
Lots of Storage and Bandwidth
VPS Hosting Cons
Higher pricing than Shared Hosting schemes
4) Hosting Specifications of Your Website or Web Application
When you decide to host your website online, there are certain specifications that you need to look into. The organization that you pick for hosting can directly affect the performance of your website. These are briefly explained below. Other than these factors, you also need to consider the quality of the service, customer support, user interfaces provided etc.
Languages and Frameworks Used
Database Requirement
Email
Storage
Bandwidth
SSL Certificates
Backup
Language and Framework Used
The front end language which is based on HTML, CSS is generally supported, and does not require any special hosting capabilities. But when it comes to the language and frameworks the website will be using, we need to carefully pick our hosting service. Sometimes, not only the language, but its version is also inform. The most common language for back-ends of web applications is Php. This comes in many version and if your website is coded in Php 7.0 and the web host only supports Php 5, then it won't work.
Similarly, if you decide to use a different framework like Symfony or Laravel, you need to always check whether the web-host provides support for these frameworks. Therefore, these should be checked before purchasing your web hosting service.
Database Requirement
Most web applications use My-SQL as their database which in turn is supported by many hosting platforms. Even for databases, the specific types and versions should also be considered when selecting your web host. Sometimes, the space offered for databases is more than sufficient, but there can be cases where you might need extra database space. Of course, if you are using a Wordpress website, the need for a database is mostly not relevant.
Depending on the size of work your website will be handling, do check the number of databases and their storage capacities. If you are setting multiple sites, multiple databases might be required. And the need for backup databases will be addressed in the latter sections of this blog.
Most users prefer to have their own email address with the website name. For example, if i'm working for the company named WSO2, I would prefer to have emails as keetmalin@wso2.com. If you require these options to be provided by the web host, you need to look for proper web hosts who provide these. Sometimes, the number of emails that can be created is limited through the host.
But, even if your web host doesn't provide the sufficient email facilities, you can always look for email services like Gmail to cater to your needs.
Storage
Storage is the amount data that you will be storing inside the servers of the web host. This is more like the size of the website and its content. If your website is a general website with text and a few images, you need not to worry about storage problems. But if the website is supposed to scale, or if it contains many videos and images, then the normal storage space given by Web Hosts, might not be enough. Therefore you need to take these factors into consideration as well. In general, the storage provided by web hosts is more than enough for a general web application.
The normal storage provided by web hosts is the Standard hard drives. But you can also purchase SSDs (Solid State Drives) on the web hosts, which are more expensive, but faster.
You can also pick multiple hard drives for storing and mention the approach to be used. Below image depicts the RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) approaches.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be uploaded by the host to the visitors' browser. In other words, it is the amount of data that can be downloaded by visitors from the web hosts storage space. In general, web hosts mention that the bandwidth is unlimited, but there is always a certain limit that they can provide up to.
For a normal website, the bandwidth provided by web hosts is sufficient. But if your website is getting a lot of traffic, or if it contains a lot of data that goes back and forth (like videos and high resolution images), then you need to consider going for a higher bandwidth. The rule of thumb for Bandwidth is as follows.
Bandwidth = site data (size of the contents) * site traffic (number of visitors)
Eg:
If you have a website, calculate the following.
Visitors per month for a webpage
Size of a webpage
Average number of pages viewed per user visit
Bandwidth = (Visitors per month for a webpage) * (Size of a webpage) * (Average number of pages viewed per user visit)
SSL Certificates
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. This is a standard security protocol for establishing encrypted links between a web server and a browser in an online communication. You are advised to obtain an SSL certificate if you carry sensitive user information and valuable data. But it is always preferred to have this, just to be on the safe side.
Some web hosts provide the SSL certificate for free for around 1 years time. But in general you need to purchase it.
Backup
Two important factors in Backup are, the backup mechanism and the backup frequency. It is always good to have backups on your website in case of an unpredictable event. Most web hosts provide this facility for an additional cost. You can also select a good host or an option based on the backup frequency you require. A daily backup would be fine.
References