A Quick Intro
A quick read to the intricacies of getting your website up and running. This article was initially written back in 2011 and will be continuously updated to help you with getting your website, blog, company site up and running. An open discussion which you can always come back to for tips.
Purpose
The purpose of this article, is to give someone who is starting out a business or a blog a level of understanding of what is out there and what you are essentially paying for.
Now first and foremost, you will need to understand that a Domain and Hosting are two different elements altogether. I will not dive into Firewalls, DNSs, CDNs, HAs, etc.
A Domain is essentially your address, or the Name that is being reserved. This would usually be an annual cost that you would need to pay for and your name with a .com, .one, .net, .etc prepended.
Your Hosting element is the land and property that will be attached to your domain. This is in essence the bulk of your costs and the brains of your website or application.
What do I choose?
You choice of web host depends on a few factors such as,
how much are you willing to spend?
how demanding your web application is?
how much traffic you expect?
the latency or TTFB (Time to first byte) you wish to achieve?
the security you wish to have for your applications?
do you have technical capabilities in setting up your own server?
Are you a start-up, business or company?
A word of advice, if you are a business or a company. Please don’t head to the Shared Hosting options – if you are serious about your business or company. Yes, I understand that the cost involved may be attractive. But in the near or short term, you will face issues with latency, availability, security, etc. and the cost for a developer to come in with a network team to help move your content and applications, secure your developments will be a costly prospect.
Hosting Options
“Shared Hosting” – which is what you are getting via GoDaddy and CloudSpiffy, is the most economical in the hierarchy of web hosting service, albeit excellent solutions for Domain Hosting. This can be very economical for small web sites (those with under 1,000 visits per day). There are many providers including DreamHost, and other smaller companies. Make your decision based on cost, reliability, and support of the application platform you want to use.
Expect under $10-15/month.
“Premium/Extended Shared Hosting” – Which is what you are getting with CloudSpiffy – Web Hosting Services and other CPanel Based services, are similar to the “Shared Hosting” Services, but with the provision of a Control Panel, more Disk-Space (i.e. without Overselling/Limitation Clauses), Extended but Usable Bandwidth and added Functionality such as Add-On Domains, eMail Functionality, Subdomains, etc. .For example, our Web Hosting Services include LiteSpeed Tech. for those using L.A.M.P. (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) Systems.
Expect about $25-45/month.
“Virtual Private Hosting” – This next level of service, provided by RackSpace, Slicehost, SoftLayer, Hivelocity, CloudSpiffy and others, guarantees you a higher level of service, bandwidth, and control of your server environment. If you need to install custom applications, and directly control your operating system configuration, you’ll want at least this level of service. This is a good solution for web sites under 10,000 visits per day and configurations where multiple servers are needed;
Expect to pay in the $40/mo range per server.
“Dedicated Hosting” – gives you exclusive use to your own server. Most hosts have a manual provisioning process that can take 24 hours to setup your hardware. But then you have complete control and exclusive use of that resource. Depending on your application complexity, you can serve up to 100,000’s of daily visitors from a single server. More complex applications may require multiple front-end web servers, and one or more back-end database servers.
Expect to pay $50-$100/mo per CPU, plus bandwidth charges and additional service charges.
Amazon EC2 gives you a dedicated machine, but offers the flexibility to provision one of more machines very rapidly (and even go up and down as demand changes). If you need the flexibility to scale your application as demand grows, EC2 is a great choice. You will likely find less expensive hosting dedicated hosting options, but with much slower turn around time on changing your configurations or adding machines.
Expect to payment to begin at about $80/mo per CPU.
Google’s AppEngine service. While not a generalized hosting model, AppEngine provides a different level of Cloud Computing that scales automatically when your demand goes up. Applications have to be written specifically for AppEngine (in the Python programming language, today), but the popular Django framework is supported.