Unofficial MWS blog

Let us suppose you have recently gone through all the hardships of developing a website. What’s the next step? Of course, you should make your website available for its users by placing it somewhere in the Internet, otherwise it’s just a thing in itself. In this article we’ll consider various types of website’s dwelling in the Internet which is called hosting.

What is hosting?

Hosting is a service that provides your website with everything it needs to run. Any website—from a simple presentation acting as your web-presence to a complex system supplying the core of your business—needs a web server where the website is installed. A hosting provider gives you a web server or some place on the web server and maintains it. Hosting providers may also offer additional services:

• backups –reserved copies of your website created normally on a daily basis;
• monitoring –keeping an eye on your website (of course, automatically) in order to identify if it’s not available and take required actions;
• domain name maintaining – assistance with registration and maintaining of your website domain, e.g. “website.com”.

Hosting providers may allow you to select the level of responsibility for the server. In the first case, you are in charge of initial installing of an operating system, software, rebooting the server in case of trouble, etc. Usually in this case the only things the hosting provider is responsible for are hardware and connectivity. Otherwise you may entrust almost all these activities to the hosting provider.

A development company may provide their own hosting service like we do. It looks like the most convenient option for you if you don’t have a technical person on board and involve an external development supplier, which can provide such a service.

Hosting types

Hosting may be organized in various ways and, technically speaking, there are three major types of hosting.

1. Shared hosting is the one where your website is placed on the same server as many other websites. Shared hosting is usually based on an open-source platform which is practically free just for the sake of economy.

MWS mostly specialise on Java and PHP hosting. In general, Java hosting is more expensive than PHP because fewer Java applications can be placed on one server. Even an idle Java application occupies resources, and that’s why the same server may keep less Java applications compared to PHP.

Shared hosting supposes there is a system administrator on the hosting provider side who manages the server, i.e. installs and updates software, gives access to new users, etc. It may be convenient if your website doesn’t require a lot of specific software (e.g. an old version of a particular standard module in Java or PHP, flash video streaming), server configuration options, and you would not like to perform the daily server maintenance yourself. This hosting type fits many small websites, and the main reason for that is that it seems to be the cheapest solution.

1. Dedicated hosting is the hosting where you have the whole server at your disposal. You may install any operating system and software, upgrade and reboot at a convenient time for you. This hosting type seems to be the most advantageous in terms of reliability, flexibility and the general convenience; however, it’s the most expensive option.
2. Virtual hosting provides a separate virtual machine for your personal usage. Virtual machine is a logical structure which provides you with a facility to work with it like in the case with the dedicated server. However, physically there can be multiple virtual machines running on a single server which is normally quite powerful. One of the advantages of this hosting type is that you may have a backup of the whole machine which can be deployed on another physical server quite easily, without a necessity to install and configure the whole system from the scratch. A popular example of virtual hosting is Amazon EC2 service.

MWS provides all three types of hosting, and we select one individually according to clients’ needs and known peculiarities of supported websites. As we are a development company in our primary role, normally we provide hosting for web sites we are developing or supporting.

Factors to consider while choosing a hosting solution

If you are in a position of deciding which hosting type suits your web site best, you have to define which factors are the most important for your business and then select an affordable hosting type which meets these requirements.

Making a final decision

When making a decision on choosing a hosting solution, you should consider several factors including:

• How sensitive is your application to a standstill?
• What are the consequences of an unauthorised access to your data?
• Which resources are the most critical for your application (e.g. if it performs some heavy calculation like video processing or frequent report generating, CPU is critical for you but if you run an online image gallery, disk space may be more important)?
• What traffic do you expect from your website (e.g. if that’s your internal system used for an automatisation of the business process, it may be low-traffic but if that’s an open resource popular with thousands of users, you will obviously receive a lot of traffic)?

Whichever technical solution you choose, your decision on a hosting provider may be even more important. If you order the hosting service at the development company than you don’t have to be an expert and identify what causes a problem with the website—whether that’s a hardware or software problem or that’s the application failure. You just have a single support channel, and you don’t have to act as a mediator between your developer and the hosting provider.

There is no universal answer about which hosting to choose because all websites are different, and so are requirements to them, and of course the hosting budget may vary. So we do not intend to impose a single solution which would solve all possible problems, but hope the information you have read will help you to make a right decision.