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Web HostingWeb Hosting
Doug Kaye,RDS Strategies LLCIntroduction 699
The Categories 699
The Components of Web Hosting 699
Web Site Traffic 701
Measuring Web Site Traffic and Bandwidth 701
Cost 702
Shared and Dedicated Servers 702
Volume and Standardization 703
Three Tiers of Shared-Server Vendors 703
Dedicated Servers 704
Colocation 705
Open Racks 705
Locked Cabinets 706Cages 706
Bandwidth Costs 706
Managed Services 706
MSP Segmentation 707
Vendor Flexibility 707
Facility Neutrality 708
Service Levels 708
Pricing Models 709
Conclusion 709
Glossary 709
Cross References 710
Further Reading 710INTRODUCTION
Web-hosting services (like Web sites) come in all shapes
and sizes. The chart in Figure 1 shows the distribution
of annual Web-hosting budgets for U.S. businesses. The
average budget is on the order of $1,200 to $1,800 per year
($100 to $150 per month), but note that more than 10%
of all businesses surveyed spend more than $100,000 per
year.
Because of this tremendous range of offerings, you
might think that the services at one end of the spectrum
are very different from those at the other end. In fact, these
services are far more alike than they are different. For ex-
ample, all Web sites, no matter how small or how large,
require Web servers, domain name services, backup and
recovery, and connections to the Internet. But it would be
nearly impossible to analyze as a single group this wide
range of offerings that fall under the Web-hosting um-
brella. In order to keep our analysis more manageable,
we will segregate the vendors into categories, and then
study each category in detail.THE CATEGORIES
After a few years of confusion over the various types of
Web hosting available, the vendors have settled into four
distinct service categories. Nearly everyone in the Web-
hosting industry and the trade press has accepted these
categories. As a result, the categories are now consistent
and helpful in distinguishing the many vendors.
In the least expensive, or low-end, category areshared
servers.As their name implies, these are computer systems
that are shared by more than one Web site, and hence are
appropriate for small, simple, low-traffic sites.
Next on the list arededicated servers.These are nearly
identical to shared servers with the obvious exception that
they are not shared but rather dedicated to a single Web
site or to multiple Web sites owned and controlled by the
same business entity. As compared to shared servers, dedi-
cated servers offer more capacity and flexibility and better
security, but at a higher price.The next category is a substantial step away from the
previous categories, but in some ways a step backward.
Instead of offering more support than is available from
shared- and dedicated-server Web-hosting services,colo-
cationis a rather bare-bones service that merely houses
servers in a data center and connects those servers to the
Internet. It does not include the server hardware or any
of the software and services necessary to operate a Web
site. Colocation by itself is aimed at customers who want
to supply and manage their own Web-site hardware and
software, but who do not want to provide the physical
facilities and may not want to manage their links to the
Internet.
Managed service providers(MSPs)—the fourth and final
category—address the huge gap between the bare-bones
offerings of colocation services and the needs of owners of
major Web sites. Colocation services and MSPs have de-
veloped truly symbiotic relationships in which one could
not succeed without the other, and the combination of
these two services is often the choice of high-end Web
sites.THE COMPONENTS OF WEB HOSTING
Theservice component pyramidin Figure 2 illustrates
the relationships of the separate components of Web
hosting. Each layer generally supports the layers above
it and depends on the layers below it. For example,
operating-system software provides an environment for
application servers yet requires hardware on which to
run.
Note the following:The service components available from shared- and
dedicated-server Web-hosting services are essentially
the same and have, therefore, been combined into a
single group.
Colocation, on the other hand, includes very few ser-
vice components—just those at the lowest levels of the699