The Eclipse Guide to Hosting

Any business can benefit from its own website - whether your trade is accountancy or advertising, piano teaching or plumbing. But whether you're used to balancing books or unblocking U-bends it's unlikely you'll be an expert in IT as well, so organising an online presence can be a daunting task.

One of the things you'll need to consider when getting your business online is where and how to host it. The Eclipse Guide to Hosting your Website explains the basics of web hosting, making sense of the range of options available to you.

Hosting: The Basics

All websites, no matter how simple or complex, need to be hosted somewhere. Put simply, web hosting is the process of giving your site a place to 'live', from where it can be accessed via the internet.

Today's businesses face an explosion of choice as to how they host their web sites, however, the most fundamental decision you need to make is this: should you host it yourself, in-house, or should you outsource hosting to a specialist provider?

Do It Yourself

Hosting a website internally requires technical skills and a high upload speed broadband connection to set up and manage the server you host it on (essentially a powerful computer connected to the Internet). Whilst managing your own server gives you absolute control over your website, it also makes you fully responsible for all aspects of setup and maintenance, which can be a time-consuming and costly process.

Outsource

By allowing a third party to host your website (rather than using your own server as its base) you can outsource the management of the hosting equipment, commonly with the benefit of a simple online control panel to keep you in control without the need for technical skills. This approach is often favoured by small and medium-sized businesses, where dedicated IT resources are often unavailable.

An outsourced web host will either own a collection of servers (known as a data centre), or rent space within one. Reputable web hosting suppliers will offer fast and reliable connections to your site, high security levels and the peace of mind of a backup power source.

Hosting: Getting Started

There are several different types of web hosting. The option that's best for you will depend on your budget and specific needs:

Free Web Hosting

A way for your business to have an online presence without incurring any extra cost. Some firms will host your website for free, as long as you agree to their terms - for example, running banner advertising at the top of every page of your site. You may be able to use your own domain name for your site or your site's address may be a part of your host's domain name - for example www.yoursitename.hostingcompanyname.com (free sub-domain hosting). However, free web hosting often comes with no customer support, no guarantees of performance or reliability, and few options to improve or expand your site. Check with the hosting company before you sign up.

Shared Hosting

Your site is allotted a set amount of space on a server in return for a set monthly fee. Shared hosting is very common as it's a simple, low-cost option. The downsides include service unreliability (because hundreds of sites may share the same server) and your site only being allocated a small amount of disk space and bandwidth.

Dedicated Or Managed Hosting

A full server is dedicated to your business, enabling you to host larger, more complex pages, cope with large amounts of visitors, or even host hundreds of separate sites. Dedicated hosting is ideal for eCommerce sites or anyone who wants to start their own hosting company, selling on hosting services. It offers a very high level of reliability, but this is reflected in the cost - the monthly rental for such a service is more expensive than other options, typically ranging from around £100 a month to over £500 depending on the power and speed of the server, and the level of support provided.

Co-Located Hosting

While dedicated hosting sees you renting a server in a data centre, co-location means that you own a server that's located in a third party's data centre. Your server can access a reliable, high speed Internet connection, and you pay a fee for power, space and maintenance and bandwidth. The major downside to this type of hosting is the initial investment involved in buying your own off-site server.

The Truth About Availability

When choosing server hosting it's important to think about availability. Put plainly, this is the percentage of time your server needs to be working. Hosting your server internally means that you're responsible for this, but outsourcing means that your availability is covered by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for a dedicated hosting service.

An SLA is a contract between you and your hosting supplier, which guarantees a certain 'uptime' each month. Typically, this is a percentage between 99 and 100%, with the exact figure usually affecting the price you pay.

The difference in SLA’s may seem small to someone who only wants to run a basic website, but if your site includes a significant database or a large online shop it may be essential for it to be up and running all day, every day. You need to decide whether the slightest suspension in service would have a detrimental effect on other sites or services that rely on yours and choose an appropriate SLA accordingly.

With a 100% SLA, if an issue arises which means a server goes offline, the websites hosted on it are switched to 'mirrored' servers, so remain available. And should something catastrophic happen and your server stalls, an SLA will mean that your business is financially compensated for any suspension of service.

The table below shows some of the common service level promises - you can see what these actually mean in terms of your site being down. Some businesses can accommodate short periods of downtime, others can't.

How much downtime is allowed in my service contract?

Checklist

Disk Space

Does your site have a simple, text-based design or is it very image-heavy with multiple pages and functions? The more complicated it is the more disk space it will need.

Bandwidth

How many visitors do you expect to your site? Every visitor eats into your monthly bandwidth limit, so traffic-heavy sites will require higher limits to avoid them becoming unavailable or incurring extra charges.

Email Accounts

How many email accounts do you want your site to have? Do your customers need to contact multiple members of staff or just a central address for support?

Support

Can you host the site yourself, or do you need external support? If so, will email support suffice or do you need someone at the end of the phone as well? 9 to 5 or 24/7? The more crucial your site is to your business the more support it will need.

Server Type

Is your site small and simple or does it need to run specific applications, such as a Microsoft SQL server database? Hosting can take place on Linux or Windows systems, so if you need something specific you may have to choose which one you want to use.

Extra Features

Is your site a basic business 'brochure site', or is it more complex, such as an online store site running from a database? Specific functions like message boards or content-management tools may require additional software to be installed on the server. Check with your host what scripts can be used. Shared hosting is more limited in functionality versus what you can run on your own dedicated server.

If you are enhancing your own site with a design and development company, make sure you understand whether the new features can be hosted on your existing space or whether you will need to upgrade your hosting to a dedicated server. More functionality will usually mean a more expensive hosting environment will be required.