Web Hosting Today

A good managed Web hosting provider should have the people, systems and resources that are required to control a complex server environment.

Managed hosts are paid to maintain and exercise control over every facet of a hosting operation. They should manage the provisioning, deployment, testing, and ongoing management of all networking devices, including routers, switches, SSL accelerators, firewalls, routing tables and virtual private networks. The host should also monitor all customer hardware, such as servers, to resolve any issues related to them in order to maintain the highest levels of performance and uptime.

A main characteristic for a managed host is quality of equipment and service. Servers and any other hardware should be top of the line, and backed by extensive warranties and on-site service contracts. The hosting provider should not only emphasize hardware, but also attend to the way software is deployed. The provider should manage the installation of the operating system and supporting software. This includes the provisioning, testing and deployment of security patches, service packs, upgrades and revisions on a continual basis.

The ideal managed hosting provider will also look after the installation and maintenance of server applications, including data administration, backup and migration. It should also monitor log files to assess site performance, traffic patterns, disk space usage and other considerations to predict potential server weaknesses and even failures. Consumers of managed services should also check to determine whether their hosts can fulfill every detail of the managed deployment, from server and equipment procurement to quick implementation of the new technologies.

Systems and resources are not the only major considerations that consumers should make when choosing a managed host. You will also want to consider whether the sales and technical staff are knowledgeable enough to entrust your online business to.

A host’s human resources are often the most important consideration when picking a service provider, since their people will be interfacing with you and your equipment more often than in a typical low-end, shared hosting situation. As a consequence, you will want to make sure that the people you deal with at the provider are both qualified and experienced. Qualified technical people will have certifications in operating systems, routing equipment and other applications. Sales and customer support staff will have a wealth of experience from spending years in the industry.

In most managed hosting situations, a dedicated account manager is allocated to the customer. This allows both the company and the consumer to have a singular point of contact for any sale request or technical support inquiry. Ideally, the dedicated account manager should be immediately available during regular business hours and have an available alternate at all other times. A first-rate managed host will also allow a consumer to quickly escalate any service request direct to management. With a more complex host, management should always be more accessible to customers, considering the significantly greater premiums paid by managed hosting customers.

The good managed host, in a word, should be proactive. It should seek not only to provide bare-bones equipment and connectivity, but also to actively manage that equipment and connectivity in order to provide you with the highest level of efficiency from the service. That is the main qualification you should seek from your managed host….

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Distributed server architectures based upon “blades” are rapidly emerging in the data centers of corporations and Internet service providers.

Historically, servers only assumed the form factor of a re-purposed desktop computer or rack-mountable appliance. These servers utilized high-quality components and leverage additional memory and hard disk capacity. Now server form factors are evolving into single PC cards that can be plugged into a chassis as a single module.

Bladed servers stack numerous independent lower-end servers within a single chassis. Chassis can accept anywhere from eight to 24 blades. Each blade is an independent system with its own memory, processor and network connection. Due to their compact size, multiple blade servers can be placed in a single server rack or enclosure, allowing numerous systems to share electricity and HVAC resources.

Gartner DataQuest (dataquest.com) predicts that worldwide server blade shipments will increase from 84,410 units in 2002 to more than one million in 2006. The IT research firm anticipates that revenue from server blades will reach at least $1.2 billion during this time period. Blades are thus becoming the one major segment of the server market that is experiencing escalating growth.

The popularity and fast growth of the blade server can be attributed to cost-savings that the device accrues to its users, especially hosting firms and service providers. Because more than 250 blade servers can be effectively placed into a single rack, it is possible for hosting firms with data center operations to quadruple their hosting capacity with the devices. By comparison, most of today’s low-end servers have only a single computer in one enclosure, allowing only one 42 systems to fit in an industry-standard rack.

Because blade servers are small, consume less power and generate less heat than an average server, they are emerging as an ever-popular option for niche Web hosting services. With the cost of data center space at approximately $300 per square foot and with energy costs increasing throughout continental North America due to deregulation, blade servers have become the de facto standard for increasing data center profitability.

The systems are typically used as Web servers and caching servers that deliver Web pages to Internet browsers, SSL servers for encrypted communication, and streaming servers for audio and video transmissions. Most hosting companies and service providers appreciate the devices because they are easy to install and employ dedicated software that improves their administration, performance and reliability. The devices are also increasingly being utilized as firewall devices and to increase capacity in corporate data centers.

Blade severs are excellent devices for hosting companies with large existing data center deployments who want to capitalize upon existing PCI expansion space. The inclusion of a single blade allows a hosting company to double its computing power or hosting offering, utilizing the same amount of physical space. The main disadvantage concerning PCI-based blade servers is that the processors are usually not as robust as traditional high-end servers. This factor limits the use of the server to functions such as low-end Web hosting.

While blade severs have the capacity to serve streaming video and other demanding applications, often the emerging technology is used for back up or storage purposes. Lower-end models usually depend on server or operating system virtualization, causing the server to run much slower than traditional equipment.

It is thus incumbent upon a reseller to determine whether a hosting company is utilizing blade servers for mission-critical deployments and whether those servers can accommodate demanding applications.

Resellers who operate their own equipment might want to consider utilizing blade servers as an effective technology to add firewall or other security specific capacities to their colocated equipment.

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Compression reduces the size of files, in the case of Web content lowering the time it takes to download. Compression software uses complex mathematical equations to scan a file for repeating patterns in the data. It replaces the data with smaller codes that take up less room.

While surfing the Internet, consumers will undoubtedly find text, graphics, audio and video files to download. Multimedia files can be very large, which means they move very slowly across the network. Downloading these files may take hours, depending on the speed of Internet connection. To make efficient use of disk space and to speed things up, most large files are compressed.

The most popular of compression utilities is WinZip. With over 130 million downloads WinZip allows Internet users to save storage space, dramatically reduce email transmission time and efficiently archive documents.

The program now specifically incorporates encryption algorithms to protect sensitive data. The WinZip standard even permits the creation of self-extracting archives, which turns archives into executable programs that can be opened automatically, without the aid of the main compression program.

The use of ZIP compression not only condenses the size of files, but also combines multiple freestanding files (potentially hundreds or thousands) into one archived file. This eases the transport of large files across the Web. Un-streamed multimedia files and software application set-up files are often encoded as ZIP files to facilitate easy download and deployment on a client computer.

Compression can also reduce the size of Web pages. Recently, GZIP, a Unix compression standard, has been incorporated into both Web servers and browsers. As a result, many browsers support transparent compression using GZIP.

If a compression-enabled server detects that the browser supports GZIP encoding, it can compress and send the data using the GZIP encoding at the transmission level. When the compressed data arrives at the browser, it is decompressed transparently. The traffic from the server to the browser is reduced, which can significantly shorten the load time for the page.

With the advent of specific new code in the PHP scripting environment, Web page compression can also be implemented very quickly across an entire Web site. In PHP 4.0.4, the new function “ob_gzhandler()” is designed to check the “content-encoding” transport header for deflate or GZIP indicators, and automatically compresses the output using the supported encoding. Using it is as simple as turning output buffering on, and requires only a single line of code.

For those site administrators without native compression capacity within their hosting environments, file deflation is the most selected option. File deflation is achieved with the use of an HTML compression tool. Such programs can allow Web developers to reduce the size of their Web pages by as much as 20 percent without compromising the “look and feel” of the Web pages themselves.

Using HTML compression utilities, Web pages will become much smaller, causing faster load times and saving both bandwidth and server disk space. The utilities work by simply eliminating any free space or redundant or unnecessary code within HTML or other Web files.

Redundant and unnecessary code created by some HTML editing programs can greatly increase the size of a Web site. Cumulatively, these larger file sizes can lead to greater transfer and storage costs. For this reason, especially when dealing with a large Web site without built-in compression, Web developers should consider employing HTML compression utilities. Most utilities are priced between $20 and $45.

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