Web Hosting 101
Building a website is just the first part of establishing an Internet presence; installing that website on a server connected to the Internet — a “web server” — is how users will actually see the site you've created.
A “webhosting provider,” like ServInt, is a company that owns, operates and rents (or sells) these web servers, and offers the high-speed connections necessary to quickly deliver website content to end users.
The equipment is housed in a data center, which features sophisticated environmental control and monitoring systems, fire-suppression capability, and security systems to prevent unauthorized physical and electronic intrusion.
Hosting providers maintain their web servers, adding new hardware and software as needed, monitoring the systems to ensure maximum uptime, installing security patches, and providing customers with help and support. Most of the differences between hosting providers can be found in these areas of responsibility. Cheaper web hosts usually find the money to offset their lower monthly fees by reducing their investment in maintenance and customer support — whereas “enterprise-grade” hosts like ServInt spend more time and money making sure their customers' sites are always up and running.
Hosting Options
Currently, there are four primary types of web hosting available:
Shared Hosting
In a shared hosting environment, multiple websites on the same server share the same hardware, connectivity resources and some software. For small or very simple websites, this can be an acceptable hosting solution, but performance and security are often major issues.
Because some sites on the server may require large amounts of memory and bandwidth, the efficient performance and delivery of other sites on that server can be negatively affected. Certain applications that can be modified by one user may affect all others, and there is a risk of data being compromised (usually unintentionally) by other users.
For these reasons, ServInt does not offer its customers shared hosting environments.
Virtual Private Server Hosting
Virtual Private Servers (VPS) afford customers more control over their hardware resources, software and access than shared servers.
With a VPS solution, multiple customers are housed on the same server, but each client has a “private” area on the server to which critical resources are assigned — so the performance of one customer's site does not impact the performance of other sites in a different partition. Also, the number of private areas on each server is limited, ensuring that resources are not over-leveraged.
ServInt uses Parallels Virtuozzo virtualization software running on the CentOS operating system to create its VPS environments. Each VPS customer has a unique environment on the host node with full root access to his or her VPS. And in conjunction with ServInt's SimpleScale™ technology, scaling up or down between various package tiers is a very simple process for customers.
Finally, ServInt's VPS Hosting solutions are "managed services," an important point to remember when selecting a VPS provider. "Managed services" means the web host, in this case ServInt, is responsible for configuring everything installed and delivered with a new account, and for repairing any problems with any ServInt-configured system, at no charge. This includes restoring any data lost as a result of technical failures — even if a full data loss is experienced. We also handle a number of other technical issues, such as installing patches for the operating system, as well as supporting certain key third-party software.
ServInt offers several VPS hosting plans to meet the technical and budgetary requirements of your website.
Dedicated Server Hosting
Traditional “dedicated server” hosting is where only a single customer is housed on a webserver, i.e., that server is “dedicated” solely to that client. It's possible to have multiple websites on a dedicated server, but they are all assigned to and/or under the control of that individual customer.
Like traditional dedicated servers, ServInt's dedicated servers are sold one to a customer — so you are never affected by what other customers are doing with their sites. What makes our dedicated line special is that they run a Virtuozzo virtualization layer with ServInt's propriety SimpleScale technology. This virtualization layer is designed to provide high levels of redundancy, quick image restoration in the event of a catastrophe, and free nightly backups. It also provides the customer with an extremely scalable platform. Any VPS customer can scale up their VPS to a dedicated server, and vice versa.
For those customers who want the power and security of a dedicated server, but — because of the nature of their highly specialized applications — need a server without a virtualization layer, ServInt offers our Self-Managed Dedicated servers. This is typically only necessary for highly specialized cases where kernel access or a broader choice of OS is needed.
Cloud Hosting
To a certain extent, Cloud hosting is simply another form of server virtualization, not unlike the virtualization system ServInt uses for VPS. The nature of the virtualization it offers, however, is significantly different. For one thing, it is a hypervisor-based virtualization technology, which gives each user "instance" more flexibility and control. True Cloud offerings give customers kernel access, choice of OS, and much more.
Cloud hosting also divorces the user instance from any one piece of hardware. The "cloud" in Cloud hosting is a suite of hardware that is controlled by a centralized software management layer. This gives each cloud the ability to grow as needed simply by having technicians add hardware. But for users, there are budgetary and performance trade-offs to consider.
The challenge with Cloud Hosting is that it is, perhaps paradoxically, far more complex than VPS or dedicated hosting. If a VPS is the Swiss Army knife of servers, able to do any number of things at once and pretty good at scaling, a single Cloud instance is like a chef's knife in a jumbled drawer of kitchen gadgets: it works best when used to do one thing — and it does it very, very well.
In concrete hosting terms, while a single VPS server might house a database, run a web server, an email server and a name server, a single Cloud instance is designed to do one thing at a time and scale that single function on demand. While it's true that one could use a single Cloud instance to run more than one application, doing so would cause the user to lose the benefit of easy instance scaling. For example, you wouldn't want one instance running your email and web server because if the instance needed to scale to handle increased web traffic, you would also have just scaled your email server without reason (and at some cost). Cloud customers typically have many instances running at any given time, each performing one specific function. And each being billed individually.
To avoid cost overruns, many businesses choose to build their own "private" clouds in which they control all the hardware their Cloud instances exist on. Doing so gives them the ability to support all their business hosting and storage needs on multiple instances they set up and tear down at will, on a secure platform of their own design that they control. Since they manage their own dedicated hardware and pay for the sole use of it, they pay for their server on a simple monthly basis — rather than tracking and managing the hourly use of multiple, app-specific instances.
Private clouds are perfect for customers that need the ability to steadily and flexibly add resources, and who do not have massively dynamic workloads requiring unpredictable spin-up and tear-down of temporary instances. Typically, these are the requirements of larger business hosting customers.
For more information on any of ServInt's packages Contact ServInt Sales for a no-obligation quote.