My experiences with hosting

[Green2K]

I thought, given the recent problems I've been reading, I'd share my experiences:

- You usually get what you pay for.

- Shared hosting cannot by its very nature, be guaranteed reliable. In fact, generally shared hosting is unreliable and unpredictable because you have no control over what other sites are doing in terms of resource use.

- All web-servers should have redundancy on the major point-of-failures: RAID 1 HDD's and dual-power supplies.

- Dedicated servers are more secure, offer better performance and will tend to be more reliable because you are in control of what is running on the box. Many places offer managed dedicated servers so there is no need to be a guru. Plus, with a dedicated server if you like to tinker yourself you can usually login and sort out any problems or reboot. If you can't get into the box then many hosting providers offer a remote reboot switch you can login to.

Hope this helps.

Green2K.

[Another Media]

Hi Green2k,

Good post.

can you shed some light on the pros and cons of a virtual private server?

Cheers,

David

[Darren M]

Given the amount of revenue some of these Affiliate sites are producing, a server failure or site crash could cost somebody a lot of money. Imagine if you were running an expensive PPC campaign for loans or something and your site went down without your knowledge. Do any shared hosting providers provide truly resilient systems?

These days, most mainstream servers have things like redundant power supplies, redundant network cards, multiple power inputs, redundant fans and hotplug redundant drive arrays or SAN storage. But hardware still fails and websites and operating systems still crash. So if you want to ensure 24/7 availability you need to look beyond machine level resilience.

To provide true system level resilience, websites should be hosted on multi server load balanced web farms using something like Microsoft NLBS or dual redundant Cisco Content switches. In the financial world these web farms are often spread across two physical locations in two different data centres, using two different ISP’s. Databases can be hosted in a similar way using various clustering technologies. All this redundancy ensures that if one server fails the others will just pick up the load with no loss of service. If an entire data centre is lost due to a natural disaster or a bomb, all traffic is directed towards the remaining data centre.

I wouldn’t expect any shared hosting providers to be offering multi-sited web farms as these are very expensive to run, but does any know of a company offering shared hosting on a single-site web farm?

[Darren M]

Originally Posted by Another Media can you shed some light on the pros and cons of a virtual private server?

Virtual Servers are great for isolating your sites from other flaky websites as they divide cpu and memory resources really well. So you don't have to worry about other sites hogging memory or cpu time. However as these virtual servers are hosted on a single physical machine, you still have a single point of failure.

One other thing to look at if you go down this route is how the hosting company is doing their virtual server backups. Backing up a virtual machine is not the same a backing up a physical machine. Some backup schemes require the virtual servers to be shutdown before the backup starts. For a lot of people this downtime is unacceptable.

The ideal situation is to place the virtual server files on a central Storage Area Nework. The SAN can do fast backups and if your physical host server goes down another physical server can take over the hosting of the virtual servers within minutes. It's just a case of pointing the new server to the virtual server files on the SAN.

[Green2K]

Hi David,

Thanks. I don't know anything about virtual private servers I'm afraid

However, from googling it looks like this is a software solution so although each "instance" may be better protected from the others, if I had anything I wanted to be up pretty much all the time, I wouldn't use it. Personally I would go for a physical dedicated server over the alternatives. But perhaps others can comment on their experiences.

I do know you can get robust Win2K/03 managed servers at a number of places for under £100 a month, and I would guess that unix boxes cost less, so the cost is really quite low now.

Depends on how what kind of numbers you are doing I guess. I try to keep hosting costs at under 5% of expected gross profit.

Green2K

Originally Posted by Another Media Hi Green2k, Good post. can you shed some light on the pros and cons of a virtual private server? Cheers, David

[Another Media]

Thanks for the information guys, I'm sure it's cleared up a few points for others too.

[Stress Head]

I moved over to a dedicated server with dedipower earlier this year and have been very pleased. Support is first class and downtime has been Nil. Highly recommended.