Web Hosting

High Traffic Sites: How to Select a Web Host
Getting a site a great deal of traffic is no simple matter, likewise, neither is finding a hosting company for a site that is well promoted. When you ve spent the time to drive traffic to a website, the last thing you want is for that website to go down. As the old saying goes, time is money, and the right web host can make a big difference when it comes to your site. It is the intention of this article to provide information regarding what sort of options a good web hosting company will provide to a high traffic site.

First, a few definitions:

Availability: The status of your site s network. Is it up and running, or has there been a failure and it is down? Meaning, can your network handle a failed device?

Performance: The speed at which an application will respond to a user request. Meaning, can your network handle a lot of traffic?

There are four main technologies that can be used to improve availability and performance:

• Load Balancers hardware price range ($3,000 - $30,000)
• Web Accelerators hardware price range ($10,000 - $60,000)
• SSL Accelerators hardware price range ($1,000 - $50,000)
• Traffic Compressors hardware price range ($9,000 - $50,000)

As you can see, these technologies can be quite expensive, which can translate into high maintenance costs from your web host. And much like strapping a jet engine onto the back of my Ford Fusion probably isn t a good idea; neither is buying a $60,000 web accelerator for your simple brochure site. So, in order to choose between what is necessary and what is overkill, here is what you ll need to know:

Load Balancers
Load balancing for a web application is a great tool for both availability and performance. A Load Balancer stands in front of the web servers, creating a virtual address to which the client connects. It then distributes traffic evenly over the web servers to reduce the load on any single server. If one of the web servers is not available, the Load Balancer will detect the failure and reroute the traffic to all of the remaining available servers. It also provides a layer of security by hiding the real IP addresses of the application servers.

Who Needs it:

• High bandwidth utilization sites.
• Sites with constant traffic where availability is key
• Example: A high traffic Adwords site (thousands of unique visits daily; ads need to be available at all times)

Load Balancers on a Budget
If you must have a load balancer but can t really afford the separate appliance option, there is software available that will do the trick for a fraction of the price. This solution is not as efficient or robust as the hardware solution, but still affords the benefit of availability and is better than not employing a load balancer at all.
Web Accelerators
Web Accelerators use technologies such as caching and compression to deliver data to a large user community faster. It mitigates pressure on your system by storing data that otherwise will be transmitted repeatedly and delivering it straight from the cache.

Who needs it:

• Heavy-traffic, database driven sites that deliver web applications
• Sites with a global audience
• Example: Epson.com (database driven, over 1 million vistors/day from around the world)

SSL Accelerators
SSL Accelerators, also like Load Balancers, stand in front of application servers. They handle the encryption and decryption of a secured communication and eliminate the need for multiple SSL (Secured Socket Layer) certificates, reducing the load on your web servers as well as the administrative costs of SSL certificates. An SSL Accelerator can be purchased as a module, meaning a smaller piece of equipment that can be plugged into the primary appliance consolidating your equipment.

Who needs it:

• Sites who s pages are predominantly secured (Banks, Insurance, etc)
• Heavily trafficked ecommerce sites
• Inefficient shopping carts.
• Example: Fabric.com (Thousands of daily visitors; Shopping cart exists on multiple servers)

High Availability
For best availability, your web host should offer all of these solutions on High Availability (HA) packages. HA is the ability to have two or more appliances that are failover capable such that if one of the appliances becomes unavailable the other picks up the load.

With HA, you can eliminate the risk of a single point of failure in your network.

Overall
Most of these technologies are more efficient and easier to maintain when implemented at the hardware level. The appliances can be pricy, but you can find good deals on refurbished and second hand equipment. Support is also quite expensive so keep it in mind.

When it comes to availability redundancy is key. It is highly recommended that your host give you the option for all applications to run on at least two servers. If you can t afford two servers, make sure you re constantly backing up your data someplace else!

When it comes to performance, it s all about hardware. Here are the fundamental elements that will make your systems run faster:

• Processors (CPU) with the highest speed (the latest and greatest)
• Lots of memory with the fastest bus (RAM) (2 GB ” 128 GB)
• A reliable Internet Service Provider (ISP) with the latest routing technology and a solid network

Finding a web host that can create a highly available and performance driven network is a daunting task for any webmaster regardless of budget. These recommendations hopefully have given insight into how anyone can achieve excellent results in performance, and what sort of hosting upgrades can be made to super-charge your site. Keep informed of new technologies and try to find a knowledgeable partner that is willing to do the research for your business.

Carlos Aguilera is an employee of Objectware, an <a href= http://www.objectwareinc.com/WebHosting.aspx >Atlanta Web Hosting Company</a> and <a href= http://www.objectwareinc.com >Atlanta Web Development Company </a>with an active branch in Washington DC. Carlos is a Cisco Certified Network Associate, and Cisco Information Security Specialist that manages the Web Hosting and Internal IT needs of Objectware, Inc.

The Purpose of Choosing a Quality Web Host
For those new to the world of hosting and website creation, picking a reliable hosting service can be tricky. People new to the field may not initially recognize why it is so important to choose a quality web host to support your website. Whether you are creating a site for pure business income, or for your child s soccer team, it is important to use a good host. Furthermore, if you are currently bringing in a steady (or any) income it is crucial to make sure that your hosting service will be dependable and give you the services you need for a fair price. By choosing a quality web host, your worries of your website being down for maintenance or other reasons are greatly reduced. Choosing the right FrontPage web hosting company is one of the most important decisions you will make regarding your Internet business. When selecting a hosting company, there are many factors to consider. Make sure to follow these four tips for choosing a hosting company for your website. 1. Know Your Needs you need to have some idea of what your web hosting needs are before you start shopping around for a web hosting company. The cost of different web hosting packages will vary based on size requirements and bandwidth capacity, so a web hosting company won’t be able to give you a price estimate without this information. 2. Reliability of the Hosting Company Before you select a hosting company, you need to know how reliable that company is. If you ask any web hosting company whether or not it is reliable, the answer will of course be yes. The question you need to ask is about downtime. You need to know how much downtime the web hosting company experiences. You also need to find out if the quoted expectation for downtime includes regularly scheduled maintenance or not. Remember that when the web host is down, the Internet component of your business is down time. If prospective customers can’t find you online when they are ready to buy, they will find what they need from someone else. When it comes to Internet business, downtime is money lost. 3. Reputation of the Hosting Company One of the great things about the Internet is how easy it is to access information online. There are a number of forums online that appeal to webmasters and website owners. When you are searching for a web hosting company, visiting these forums can be an invaluable source for information about web hosting companies. When you find an active forum where those who are knowledgeable about web hosting are posting, look for threads that are related to web hosting. If you don’t see recent posts on the topic, post a question yourself. You may get some ideas about which web-hosting companies are the best. You’ll definitely learn about some of the ones you want to avoid! 4. Customer Service You will want to go with a web hosting company that has available and responsive customer service. The first thing you should do is look at the website of a hosting company you are considering. Check out the options for customer service. If you have a difficult time finding customer service information posted on the website, that is a good sign that you are going to have trouble getting help when you need it. Ideally, you want to select a reliable web hosting company that offers 24-hour customer service with multiple ways of requesting help. Many of the best hosting companies offer live chat help, e-mail technical support, and a toll-free technical support phone number. For more information on getting started the rite way in web hosting for all your needs made simple

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Free Web Hosting, Should I Grab The Offer?
Free Web Hosting, Should I Grab The Offer? Well, my answer would be depends. If you are new to web hosting and is looking for a place to put up web pages such as an avenue web page for you, your family and friends to get together and knowing what each other is doing without the need of meeting up, a business training site or as a hobby, free web hosting services provides just what is needed to for you as it is at a absolute free cost. The advantage of free web hosting sites its that it provides you a web space for free, and in many cases, free web hosting comes with other stuff such as free designed templates and useful website creating and uploading wizards that would guide your through the makings of your website. These functions are perfect for new web masters like you to start creating web page. Furthermore, these free web hosting sites also often provides other free features such as free email accounts, file transfer via FTP, web based control panel for you to use. Free web hosting allows you to test marketing a new company or new products for you to decide whether starting a business or new product on the web with paid host is profitable. Free web hosting can also be used to bring traffic to your own paid website when you decide to have one. However, like many free stuff, free web hosting sites also has its downsides. Problems such as limited bandwidth, storage spaces start to surface when traffic and storage information increases, causing you to lose or deter more visitors from visiting your website. Ads infesting your site that you have no control of would make your site look even more unprofessional and cheap will in turn, deter your visitors traffic to increase. High downtimes are also often seen in free web hosting site and that there is nothing to do with it as free web hosting sites are not oblige to provide you with good uptime since its free.. Therefore, if you are hosting your website for things such as a hobby site, avenue for relating with friends and family or simply a test site, free web hosting is definitely something for you. Save time and efforts on comparing top 10 hosting companies. Check out our comprehensive comparison table at: http://www.buywebbiz.com/host/comparehosting.html This article is free for reproduction but must be reproduced in its entirety,including live links & this copyright statement must be included. http://www.buywebbiz.com/

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