No we didn’t go out and find hosts and make them strip to their boxers, but we figured that since hosting is such an important part of your business, we wanted to be sure we had your attention.
The wrong hosting is the single element of your online business - no matter what product you sell, what niche you sell it to or what your level of expertise - that can brring you and your business to your knees almost overnight. It would be easy to just give you a list of reputable hosts and say "Here take your picjk - these guys are all great". But just like the net itself what a host does today may not be what he does tomorrow. I’ve been burned more than once with a host who was terrific for six months, then fell down on the job later.
To understand what to look for in a host you first must understand exactly what it is they are selling, what the terms mean, and who is really selling it to you.
There are only two things a host sells you - bandwidth and space on their server hard drives. Hosting is like the food chain. There are the huge guys like AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and SBC. These are also called the backbone providers. There are just 11 of these backbone providers in the U.S. and in actual fact, these backbone providers are the controllers of the internet. Get banned or blacklisted with them for spam or illegal activities and you are pretty much done with the net unless you physically move offshore.
Backbone providers can prevent one computer location, an entire state, or even an entire country from reaching the internet. You’ve heard the expression "Don’t mess with Mother Nature", well in the world of the web "Don’t mess with the major ISP’s"!
Every single host buys the bandwidth they sell you from one of these eleven providers. Every single one. Some hosts buy bandwidth from more than one. This way they are protected in case one of the providers has an outage problem. The site your server sits on will be automatically and instantly switched to another provider’s network. In a blizzard, hurricane or other natural disaster this can come in real handy! Blizzard.com lost one entire building full of servers when it took a direct hit from a tornado a couple of years ago, yet their online operations were not affected because the millions of online players were instnatly rerouted to other server locations.
There are several levels of hosts. The top level "sits on the backbone". meaning they have a direct connection to one of the Big Eleven. There is one "hop" to the major internet pipeline - from the host to the major provider. This means you will probably have a super fast loading site no matter where someone is coming from. The fewer hops or pathways a visitor goes through to reach you, the faster the load time.
These top level hosts resell both their space and their bandwidth to smaller hosts. These hosts often resell it again, and smaller hosts resell theirs, on and on - sort of like a reverse food chain. If you’re buying your hosting from a guppy, you will probably pay more than if you purchase from a huge tuna. In addition each host reseller is adding at least one more "hop" to the pathway.
Every industry has bottom feeders and hosting is no different. There are many "resellers" who not only share host bandwidth, but also share space on host computers. The host splits up his server hard drives into sections, selling you a small section. This is called virtual hosting. The bottom feeding reseller takes HIS space on the host server and splits it up even more and resells it to you and other folks like you.
Is this wrong? Not really. It just means you have an additional level of cost and bandwidth, ram and processor drain slowing your site.
You can also buy "dedicated hosting". This means you share the machine itself with no one else. All the ram, all the processing power, all the hard drive space is yours. Until your site grows to thousands of visitors a day or you’re hosting dozens of bandwidth intense videos, you can probably do just fine on virtual hosting - sharing the machine with others. Virtual hosting usually starts under $10 a month while dedicated hosting runs about $100 a month on up to several hundred dollars per month.
Shared bandwidth on a virtual server is more of a problem than shared hard drive space. Modern technology allows some advanced hosts to expand storage space over many servers. How this can be done is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s pretty slick and means you won’t ever run out of hard drive space no matter how many people share the server with you.
Shared bandwidth is a whole other ballgame. There is only so much bandwidth that can come into any given machine. Split that between too many people, or have a couple of sites running a video download service on their space and I promise you will have a slow loading site even if it’s only a tiny squeeze page!
Hosts make money by reselling bandwidth and drive space. The more people they can put onto a server, the more profit they can make. After all they only paid one charge for both. Generally speaking just two or three people per server pays all the host’s costs and every additional person is gravy. The smaller fish in the hosting pond tend to cram too many people onto a single virtual server, slowing everyone down. Larger hosts use the sheer numbers of servers they rent to make their profit and tend to have lower limits on the number of sites placed on each server for better performance.
Now that we’ve gone into some of the common terms and concepts of hosting, we’ll go into more detail on what to look for in a good host in the next column. See ya then.
Warmest regards,
Cyndi Parker
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