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This is the companion article to "Talk Geek To Me Episode 00:Web-hosting," An Internet Radio "Podcast" sound file. This white paper is essentially a script for the sound file so the content of both will match.
This presentation covers the basics of web-hosting and gives a few tips to avoid problems with web-hosts, whether they be because the client had unrealistic expectations or finding out it if a potential web-host company is fly-by-night or sleazy/unethical.
This one is for the benefit of people really new to this dialog, I don't want to leave them out.
Web-hosting is putting your website on a machine that is always on the interweb, thus making your website always available to anybody who is logged onto the interweb.
I want to avoid getting into the mechanics of how a web-page is constructed, but quickly, there is a page, usually written in HTML, that is the page proper. That file can call upon other files, such as images, definitions of styles, animations or short video clips. These files are then put all in one place on a web-host computer under one account. That is what makes them available around the clock on the interweb.
This is not a canonical list, but before discussing web hosting, we need to get some terms straight, so here are, from what I consider to be important, some major mainstream types
Now that we have the bare basics covered, I want to give some tips I have gathered over the years to help you avoid problems, perhaps even rip-off and sleazy unethical scams.
Let's get this down. Backup your files! Of course your web-host should be doing backups, but those are his backups of the whole server and are really for his use, you should have your own set of backups. (He may charge you if you ask him to restore your files from his backup.) This is also your ticket to not having your data ``held hostage'' by a company. When you have your own backups, if things go wrong, you can easily move. It is as simple as getting a new hosting account someplace, putting your backups onto that server, and then going to wherever you registered your domains and pointing those domains to your new server. When this is done, you can say ``goodbye bad web-host.''
If you want to go the plain HTML route, you files on your local computer that you edit on is your backup, and you need to have some kind of regular backup system in place in case your personal computer's hard disk goes south.
If you use blogging software, you need to log into as the administrator and run the backup module, which will open a file on your computer through your web browser.
This is where we get into the ``meat and potatoes'' of this presentation. This is where we can talk about getting a good company, what is ethical, what is legal, and all that good deep stuff.
Web-hosting is technically complicated. While the concepts of how a web page works, and getting FOSS software running, are simple in and of themselves, it is getting it all to act with the highest level of reliability that is the trick. This ``trick'' requires real organization and technical know how. This is why you have people who do this stuff as their full time job, and it makes sense to use their technical expertise while you concentrate on the content you want to produce.
To put it another way, you computer cannot be online all the time as a server. Well, it can, but you probably don't want to. This is because what we are discussing is being proud of your work, and creating an online presence. If you want a learning experience, you can hang something off of your DSL connection if you want, but you are not serious about your presentation, your are experimenting with software at that point. If you are dealing with security patchs, people running malicious scripts on your computer, and juggling things so that your ISP does not know about you running a server on a home connection, you are not spending that time on making webpages that get out your message to the people.
And that is something I want to emphasize, building your online image and getting your message out. Knowing this difference between them (the techs you hire to care of the boxen) and you (the person with the message to be self-published,) is key to getting into a good relationship with a host. This is where knowledge pays off, it starts with knowing your roles, but extends to knowing your mutual expectations of each other. Surprises is what makes things go sour. In your role as self-publisher, you control not only your message, but also it's presentation. What this is about is up to you. However, if the server you rely upon does not function right, it is a reflection on you. When somebody is ready to look over your stuff, and they find your sites on some search engine, and they click the link that takes them to you, what is the impression if they get ``server took too long to respond, is it just this site or are no sites responding to you?'' from thier web-browser?
That makes an excellent segue into the concept of ``getting what you pay for.'' If you use a rock-bottom priced host, expect rock-bottom service and performance. It is a cliche that you get what you pay, but you do, especially here. My problems, and why I felt so victimized by web-hosting companies in the past, stems from going too budget.
Time for a little personal experience, I just got into my fourth host. I felt the experience was so bad that I was ready to chuck my domain and go back to a regional ISP's slash-tilde account, but I did some research and learned all about a practice called overselling.
There are two constants on the interweb that cannot be escaped, and they are storage and bandwidth. They can't be worked around.
Let's say a given hypothetical box can handle 100 gigabytes of storage and 1,000 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. If you want to provision this box for 100 accounts then the non-overselling model would say that each account should have an allocation of 1 gigbyte of storage and 10 gigabytes of bandwidth per month.
Now, in the real world out there, a typical website would not need that much storage. An average website needs storage and bandwidth than that. So, in the overselling business model, you start by selling 100 accounts, then you check the performance of the box. If it is not fully utilized, you incrementally add more accounts to bring the box to full utilization.
This is not unethical per se, as long as the box is assidously monitored. The problem comes when the box is loaded. Lets say we have 200 sites on this box, and that the cpu, disk, and bandwidth are all being used perfectly. What happens when somebody adds more content? Well, at that point a new box is supposed to be provisioned, but this is cost and time intensive and so gets delayed. Now you have slow downs on the box. On top of that, the pricing system employed by the web-host tends to be tight so that profits can be small enough not to allow the rapid addition of a new box.
This was typical of what happened to me. I would change web-hosts, and all was lightening fast, and over a year or two, it bacame slow as anything, and I would get disgusted and move to a new host.
With a little research, I found out that I could search for ``no-overselling web-hosts.'' They cost a little bit more. Esentially, what I was paying my last host became a a factor in my consideration, as I decided not to ever pay that little for a web-host again.
While quotes range from the very expensive (like $23/mo for 100 megabytes and a gig of transfer to the undersized (like 5 megabytes of storage,) I eventually found a deal, that was only a little (50 cents a month) more than my last, with a little more for domain registrations. I accepted it with only a little more examination.
Before the next consideration, I need to address a few more things.
First, maybe an oversold box is right for you. I am trying not to say that you should all reject oversold web-hosts, just learn to know them for what they are. They are economical, and maybe you can get more storage and you need less bandwidth with some good shopping, and maybe you don't need lightening performance. After all, they did have their reasons when they changed the interweb's nick name from ``the information superhighway'' to ``the information parking lot.'' It just happens to be not what I need. I serve audio files mainly, and I want anybody who cares to listen, or what some of us like to term ``our dear listeners,'' to have the fastest and most problem free download experience possible, so I needed all the bandwidth and storage I contracted with held in reserve for me. Your mileage may vary.
That leaves a discussion of spotting an overselling webhost. While doing my last shopping experience, I noticed that none of the no-overselling hosts offered more than 8 gigabytes of storage for non-reseller accounts. So when you see over that, they are playing a numbers and statistics game with you, and are probably an overseller. In bandwidth, the most I saw offered was a little over 150 gigabytes of transfer a month. Most sites are under a gigabyte.
Why the inflated figures, let's go back to our hypthetical host with the 100 accounts with a gig of storage and 10 gig of transfer. What is the cost of a gig of storage per month for you if each account is priced at $10 per account and you have a typical 500 megabyte website.
If you said ``my cost is $10 per gigabyte per month'' you got the wrong answer! Your website is only 500 megabytes, which is half a gig. The correct forula for your cost is not to divide the cost by the allocation, but to divide the cost by your usage. Therefore, you are paying $20 per month per gigabyte for your situation. That is how you recognize the ``crack cocaine'' of this kind of marketing. If they multiply their offering by ten, and offer 10 gigs of storage and and 100 gigs of transfer, that does not mean that the account costs $1 per gigabyte per month, it still costs you $10 per month for 500 megabytes! I'll leave it as an excercise to you, dear listener, to apply this to cell phone plans. It is the same kind of marketing. The real bad word here is ``unlimited.'' There is no unlimited in this. It simply does not exist. If you get an account with an unlimited anything, that means that you agreed not to know the limit, that's all. To put this another way, do you really think they are going to run around adding disks and disks onto servers for your dinky $10/month?
This section will be short compared to the last.
How do I know if I am headed for a relationship with a bad web-host business. You probably think I am going to recommend some kind of forum to swap notes on web-hosts to you folks, but I am not. Guess who caught up with the 21st century? The Better Business Bureau. These guys are the last stop for anybody with a bad business experience to bitch and moan about. Here is what you do, you get the billing business address of your next web-host, and search the BBB database for that host in that city and state. Watch out for any complaints on record! Something was so bad that the business couldn't fix it and the poor guy had to go to the BBB?! Well, sure, maybe one or two complaints which got responded to can be attributed to a customer who was over the top, but really, you want to do business with companies with squeaky clean records at the Better Business Bureau.
To make matters even easier for you, once you do your on-line search they also tell you how long the firm has been in business, and they give you a ``grade'' like ``A'' through ``F'' for the company. The BBB, they may be old school, but they get the job done.
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 2002-2-1 (1.71)
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996,
Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
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Ross Moore,
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