The Primary Components of the Web Hosting Business
- Wednesday, June 3, 2009, 2:39
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Loading ...To put it simply, Web hosting is a business that provides the service of storing, maintaining and serving Web pages to the Internet. Web hosting companies take on the role of providing the needed infrastructure so that everyone can publish to the Internet. This infrastructure can be quite complicated and costly.
These hosting companies are not the same as Internet service providers (ISPs). In order to access the Internet everyone needs an ISP. But in order to publish content on the Internet a Web hosting company will be a necessity. Many Internet service providers will give their customers a small amount of free hosting for a personal Web site. For a business Web site though, you’ll want to find a company that specializes only in web hosting.
Web hosting is really not as easy as it sounds though. Web site hosting is a 24 hour a day, seven day a week operation that runs all year. Web sites always need to be up and running. This puts a tremendous strain on the equipment and people that work in the Web hosting industry.
To properly host a large number of websites expensive equipment is needed. High-end computers are required to meet the ongoing demands. These computers, or Web page ’servers’, use large amounts of power and get very hot. This means even more power is required to keep the servers cool. In addition, the computers should be kept in a special data center environment that is kept clean and cold. Often times, data centers will have several large air conditioning units specifically to pump cold air onto the servers. It’s also a wise choice to have industrial size backup generators in case anything was to happen to the power.
Web hosting companies must also connect their Web servers to a backbone provider. Backbone providers are called network service providers. These companies provide direct network access to the Internet. This access is sold by what is called bandwidth. Web hosting companies buy this bandwidth and then resell it to their customers. Bandwidth is simply the amount of information transmitted along a communications channel in a given period of time.
As you can see, Web hosting is a very complicated business. To counter-balance the operational costs involved hosting companies deal in volume. A Web server can host 1000’s of Web sites. Adding everything up, there is a specific amount of money required to maintain a constantly running Web server. So each new site added to a server will decrease the overall cost per customer.
But, hosting too many Web sites on one server will start to decrease the speed and performance of the sites hosted on it. Then customers will experience the speed of their Web sites begin to slow down and might start to see general page errors when trying to load their site. A balance must be maintained by the Web hosting company between operational costs and server performance.
Web sites must be running all the time. This increases the human costs beyond that of a normal business. The hosting company must maintain a staff on location at all times. This means that instead of one 8 hour shift there are three 8 shifts. A Web hosting company will also need to cover weekends. Generally though, non-business hour staff is for technical support only.
In conclusion, the Web hosting business has many components including hardware, software, network technologies and human hard work. This synergy of man and machine makes the Internet what it is today.
Source: http://www.a1articles.com/
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