There has been an enormous amount of discussion over the past two years about new technologies that are going to set a new standard in the application hosting space. But what is fact and what is fiction, and more importantly, should you care?
The first time I heard about Grid Computing I was still up at school in the late 90s which, not surprisingly, was around the same time I was engrossed in my parallel computing course. All the talk of IPC and modulo arithmetic joined in an unholy matrimony with massive amounts of Mountain Dew and 3am whiteboarding in the labs, the offspring of which was a simple understanding of why and when to use parallel computing.
Fast forward to today and Silicon Valley’s VCs have eliminated all but the most trendy of ideas to back, the recent darlings being so-called Cloud computing. So what is Cloud Computing? Supposedly The Cloud is an ultra-scalable architecture that has implicit redundancy so no one ever has to go through the painful process of upgrading hardware; is this not the panacea of Datacenter logistics – completely automated vertical scalability?
The Promise
Current providers of Cloud provisioning software, such as 3Tera, promise less cost, ease of maintenance, and simple scalability. Need a new server? Just click a few buttons and you have a new virtual server, possibly pre-configured with software and even your specific settings.
The Failure
While having a large and dynamic infrastructure is appealing, there are inherent problems with the current approaches, the most obvious of which is the lack of failure abstraction. While products like VMWare have the ability to provide fail-over automatically, the fact that offerings like Applogic and EC2 do not provide such capabilities out-of-the-box is very telling about the underlying architecture. While many can argue that Xen-based hypervisors can be instrumented to failover, the fact that the technology does not, as a matter of its DNA, provide failover is The Failure. In order to provide the promises marketing for the various grid services has suggested, not only do we need to scale easily, but we need reliability; you cannot provide one and not the other.
Commentary
We all know that technology changes rapidly, but vendors and pundits fail when they speak as if change is good just for the sake of itself. Recently we’ve seen many old architectures rehashed: mainframe dumb-terminals have become remote desktops and terminal services, talk of Ethernet’s limitations being replaced with a protocol that involves a “Token” and the new SMP craze disguised as multi-core processing. It’s time for some real progress. It may be in the same way virtualization has brought us the Cloud that the Cloud itself may be an intermediate step to something better. At the very least let’s hope that the next step on the ladder is up, not down.
Most pundits will say how inherently global and transparent the Internet is, allowing a server with a public IP address to be accessed from anywhere. While public-facing servers do have broad accessibility there are a number of dirty secrets that the sales staff at your favorite server provider fails to mention.
So with so many moving parts to consider when getting services what should you look out for? Here are a few crucial things to keep in mind:
Global Routing
While many lay claim to how global the Internet is, those of us that operate backend systems know that there are plenty of caveats. The reachability of your server, and subsequently your services, is dependent upon how many peers your upstream provider has, and in turn, how many peers their peers have. As an example, in my area of the globe a company called Comcast provides residential broadband services. While I have one of our datacenters no more then 15 miles away, the best way to get a fast connection between my house and our local DC’s servers is to do some research and find out who Comcast peers with. It turns out that a nasty little secret is that, at least in my area, Comcast’s backbone is really Cogent, so we have a Cogent line coming into out local DC. By doing this the connection from my house to our local DC never leaves Cogent’s network, except for the edge equipment. Now there are always exceptions: if a link goes down for example the network gear will route around the failure, which may take my connection half-way across the country, but the primary route will typically be the shortest and least-expensive.
Business-Centric Infrastructure
Similar to many industries there are retail(consumer) and business(commercial) facets to the hosting industry, and as such providers tailor their services toward a particular audience. For businesses it’s important to find a provider that is aware of the requirements a business demands such as redundant components, high-performance network, reliable support contacts and value-added services. Today, more so then even 12 months ago, reliable power(main and backups) is high on the list of features to examine. It doesn’t hurt if a provider has current or previous experience in your industry either.
Managed Services
Perhaps the most import type of hosting for small and large businesses alike includes various forms of management, which indicates there are resources on-staff that are experts in a particular technology. There are a few handfuls of reliable hosting providers that can, for example, provision and host your server, manage the network and manage the software on your server. Most times the end-users of your server(i.e. your clients, your team, your internal users) are still your responsibility, but things like OS, network and backup configurations are handled by your service provider. The allure of managed services are two-fold: time savings for you and your team due to not worrying about the server and cost savings through having access to experts nearly immediately if issues ever arise.
If you are running a small business, then you are probably concerned about how ecommerce is changing how people do business these days. Unlike before when you didn’t need to have your own computer and you didn’t have to worry about web hosting, these days, there is an unspoken rule that if you want to prosper in your business, you need to have web presence. Having your own website would help you generate and facilitate sales.
If you are looking for a small business hosting service, you have several options to choose from. You really don’t have to worry about the cost because there are many affordable webhosting providers offering their service.
Different Categories of Small Business Webhosting Services
Hosting website services for small businesses can be divided into four categories — corporate co-location, managed web hosting, shared and in-house. Among these four, it is advisable for you to start with managed dedicated hosting. What does this mean? Basically, when you use a dedicated hosting website service, it means that you would rent your dedicated server from a service provider. Of course, you may customize your server and place remote server access. However, the service provider would be responsible for providing the hardware and software needed to operate the server. They would also be responsible for installing and maintaining the same. What does this mean to you then? This translates into cost savings for you and your business.
When you opt for managed dedicated hosting, you will be able to avoid the expense associated with setting up and maintaining a website. The cost of the bandwidth is oftentimes distributed to all the provider’s clients, so all of these clients save a lot of money. You would also be able to enjoy the quirks offered by the managed dedicated hosting providers. You could take advantage of the service packages as well.
A corporate co-located webhosting, on the other hand, allows you to store your own hardware and Internet connection into a particular server space that your provider will allocated for you. This allows you to save a few dollars here and there, but this does not offer the same savings that managed dedicated hosting service does.
Choosing Your Managed Dedicated Hosting Server
Generally if you want a secure, reliable but completely affordable way of putting up your website, website hosting is the perfect choice. However, you should make sure that you have a reliable webhosting provider. They should be able to ensure that they can provide search engine visibility for your website, so check for a dedicated webhosting server that is continuously up and running. This will guarantee that your website will be up all the time and people will be able to have access to you and your service at all times.
These days, business owners need to have their own website if they want to stay ahead of their competitors. However, you need to make sure that would still be able to save money from setting up and maintaining a website and you can only do this if you use a managed dedicated hosting service.
When you are running a business you know there is a need to store data, be it data that your clients have access to or data that you access to service your clients. For any business data loss will lead to a serious disaster. It is obvious that you will be storing all your data in the server at your office. Now consider a situation where your office infrastructure will not allow the server placement. In such conditions, you will be looking for a server hosting services that host your data in their servers. You will not be able to maintain the actual hardware and you have to share the critical data with other companies. These are all avoided with Continue Reading
These days in the web hosting industry, it seems that one host is much the same as another. The same uptime guarantees, the same “friendly” support staff, 30 day money back guarantee, and often the same ridiculously high storage and bandwidth allowances. People need to start thinking outside the square they live in when it comes to choosing a host.
So what if a host has an uptime guarantee? Sure it’s important that your website is available all the time, but there’s another million and one web hosts who provide a similar uptime guarantee. So what if they provide XX/X support? So does everyone else. So what if they provide more storage than you know what to do with? So what if they provide enough bandwidth to serve 99% of the civilized world? It seems every other host has turned to mass overselling* these days. So what DO you look for? Look for all of the basics. A good uptime guarantee, fast, friendly support, and enough storage and bandwidth for your needs.
Then look for individuality. Look for things that set one particular host apart from another. What do they do differently? What do they do better? What value added services do they offer? Do they cater to your specific needs? Not sure? Contact them, talk to them and see what they can do for you. See how they can help your hosting work for you. Look for reasons why a host deserves your hard earned cash over the hordes of other hosts out there. By finding a distinction between hosts, you will not only become a more informed customer, but your hosting experience will be much more enjoyable.
* overselling: A tactic employed by web hosts whereby they sell more storage and bandwidth than they could provide if every single client used their entire allocation. Properly managed overselling doesn’t negatively impact clients – in fact quite the opposite. It can allow the host to provide cheaper services while more fully utilizing their resources. The problem is when hosts start going over the top with overselling – e.g. offering hundreds of GB’s of storage and almost unlimited bandwidth for prices that boggle the mind (e.g. prices under the $10 mark).
With the flurry of companies offering domain registration recently it is very easy to get lost in the maze of bikini-clad commercials and bottom-basement pricing. After all is said and done there is a handful of things that make a good Registrar. In this article we will show you what a Registrar is, what a Registrar’s responsibilities are and what you should look for when choosing one.
With so many choices for technology out there it’s easy to get lost in the hype. You should be spending your time making your business grow, not fixing problems with your email or wondering why your website is down. Our goal with this article is to cut through the hype and give you the information you need to make an informed decision.
