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SHARED ANDDEDICATEDSERVERS 703excellent choice for simple,brochurewaresites (i.e., those
that contain only marketing and promotional content and
don’t support complex e-commerce). Major Web-hosting
services that specialize in shared servers typically build
largeserver farms—Internet data centers with rows upon
rows of racks filled with shared servers—which is how
these vendors achieve the economies of scale necessary
to offer shared-server hosting at low monthly prices. But
because prices are low, and profit margins are therefore
slim, shared-server hosting includes very little in the way
of handholding services such as help troubleshooting or
configuring of a customer’s Web site.
Shared-server hosting is sold in packages that typically
range in cost from $20 to $500 per month. Most vendors
offer more than one package and allow customers to mi-
grate or upgrade to a larger or more expensive package as
the customers’ needs increase.
Although the details of shared-server packages can vary
greatly, the standard means by which vendors define their
packages are the following:Monthly fee (recurring),
Setup fee (one-time or nonrecurring),
Monthly data transfer cap (maximum),
Maximum disk storage, and
Number of e-mail accounts (such as info@yourdomain.
com).Table 1 lists these parameters for three sample shared-
server packages.
Typically, these packages are designed so that if users
exceed the limit of any one of the measurements (data
transfer, disk storage, or number of e-mail accounts), they
are expected to move up to a more expensive package.
Using the sample packages in Table 1, for example, if a site
required 400 MB of disk storage but would only transfer
2 GB of traffic per month onto the Internet, it would be
forced to buy the midrange package rather then the low-
end one.Volume and Standardization
The computer hardware on which shared Web sites run
varies greatly. Some shared-server vendors use a small
number of large servers, each of which can host thou-
sands of sites on a single computer system. Increasingly,
however, shared-server vendors are turning to larger num-
bers of less powerful, compact servers that are physically
only 1U in height. (A “U” orrack unitis 1.75 inches.)Table 1Typical Shared-Server Packages (as of April 2003)Low-End Midrange High-EndMonthly Fee $20 $75 $500
Setup Fee $25 $75 $250
Monthly Data 10 GB 25 GB 100 GB
Transfer
Disk Storage 250 MB 500 MB 1 GB
Email Accounts 30 70 150In order to support such a large number of sites at such
a low price, shared-server hosting is necessarily based on
a very high degree of standardization. All components of
shared-server hosting are treated as though they were part
of assembly lines.
Shared-server hosting vendors typically offer menus of
features and components from which a customer can se-
lect when building a Web site. Fortunately, due to intense
competition in the shared-server hosting business, these
menus include a large number of features, and it is rela-
tively easy to compare vendors’ offerings to one another.
The following is a typical menu of shared-server host-
ing features:Daily backup to tape,
Off-site tape storage,
E-mail accounts (mailboxes),
Outbound e-mail relaying,
E-mail redirectors,
E-mail autoresponders (for automated responses to
[email protected], etc.),
Microsoft FrontPage extensions,
Discussion forum software,
Anonymous FTP,
Administrative access via telnet or secure shell (SSH),
Electronic shopping cart software,
Secure Socket Layer (SSL) for secure Web pages and
forms,
Credit card merchant accounts and transaction process-
ing,
Log file processing and analysis tools,
Support for scripting languages such as Perl and PHP,
Web-based control panels or access to configuration files
for managing Web sites,
Simple database software such as MySQL,
Firewall protection of the Web server, and
Streaming media servers (optional, at additional cost).In addition to providing these site components, a
shared-server hosting vendor maintains all of the hard-
ware and software.Three Tiers of Shared-Server Vendors
The ranks of shared-server vendors are actually divided
into three differenttiers(or subcategories), and each tier
offers advantages in certain situations.Facility-owner vendors.Vendors that own their servers
and also operate their own data centers.
Tenant vendors.Vendors that own their servers, but rent
space within colocation facilities.
Resellers.These vendors do not even own the hardware,
but rather act as agents of facility-owner or tenant ven-
dors.Facility-Owner Vendors
Today, the state of the art for data centers is quite high,
and very few vendors (shared-server or otherwise) have