Web Server Hosting Types

There are different types of hosting services that you can choose from depending on what type of web development and web site that you want to host.

Dial-Up Access Hosting – This is the most basic access/hosting service and these providers also provides a web page for hosting your site. Dial-up access hosting was the first hosting available and is still around. Most ISP’s specialize in just internet access and it’s rare that you will see an ISP do both. These companies make their money off of providing access to the Internet.

Development Hosting – Web site developers are buying their own servers and offering independent hosting services for their clients. This is called development hosting in which they provide web development services along with a host server located at their place of business. The consumer gets charged for the development and the maintenance of the web-site.

Web-Hosting ISP’s. – These are companies that specialize in hosting business web sites. There is no dial up access needed and site owners access their pages via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This is what the majority of small businesses use to put their site information on the internet. Other services are also included in the Web Hosting ISP package depending on their service plans.

These types of hosting plans are usually for corporations that need a lot of bandwidth to run their web applications. These companies run T1 access lines for big packets of internet data and have multiple connections to an internet backbone. They have fully staffed data processing facilities and the prices are substantial for using these types of services.

Corporate/Industrial Hosting – Companies like Hewlett Packard, Dell or IBM, run the server infrastructure for most of these host companies.

The SOHO business owner will usually need the Web-Hosting ISP services. It is the middle ground between the basic and advanced services.

Using Unmanaged Host Services

If you are a customer that wants total control of your web site administrative functions then you might want to look at unmanaged web hosting services to give you complete remote control administration over your server. The technical side of the server can be controlled by a designated administrator that you pick to handle your web information.

You have to have a technical person to install the server and manage the server if you don’t have the expertise because you as the customer will be responsible for maintaining the server environment. That’s why unmanaged servers are recommended for individuals and businesses with server administration resources.

As far as developing applications and controlling the applications without going through technical support personnel on the managed server side, these types of servers are usually used when companies are developing real time response systems on the internet, such as geographical, science, engineering and multimedia/entertainment applications.

Unmanaged servers allow you to add extra hard disk space to increase your space capacity and many computer companies sell physical servers that are configured for unmanaged hosting applications. Companies like Dell and HP have software programs that not only will run an office network but also handle web server and development applications.

Small businesses that don’t need a server on site and deal with administrative web packages should go with the managed host packages that provide assistance and administrative support. Managed applications will do just fine because of the costs that are incurred with maintaining an unmanaged server. Unmanaged servers need constant upgrades of software and hardware constantly which could cost your small business a big chunk of change.

Unmanaged servers are expensive to maintain and run unless you are a small firm that develops in house web applications. The best advice is to have a consultant draw up an IT plan to see if you need this type of hosting service or not.

Subdomains—Benefits and Drawbacks

Most businesses don’t like to use subdomains because they feel like they give them a disadvantage in many areas, such as having a prefix name before your web-site, being ignored by bots and index spiders in search engines and all in all, it just doesn’t look right. So let’s check our facts on subdomains.

A subdomain is substitute or second-level of a domain. A regular domain looks as follows: www.jamesbrown.com . A sub domain looks like this

http://bravenet.jamesbrown.com. Subdomains do not have www on the front of them. All subs start with “http://subdomain/maindomain.com pattern of identification.

Subdomains rank efficiently well. Search engine spiders and bots are not prejudiced when it comes to the ranking of subdomains and regular domains. As long as your site has the right SEO keywords and has been optimized, whether you have a subdomain or regular domain name doesn’t make a difference at all.

Let’s pretend that you site has a lot of categories in it. If you were to submit to a search engine, you could submit each subdomain as its own individual category and still get a good ranking.  Each subdomain would be looked at by search engines as a new site with its own index or home page. You may want to try creating subfolders on the subdomain to get around this so that search engines can read the folder as one set of site information.

People worry about their subdomain getting banned if the main domain name is banned. If the main domain is banned, it will have an effect on the subdomain. You see this happen often in adult content sites that have violated certain agreements that they have signed with a provider that does not want a domain used for adult material.

Again, there is nothing wrong with using a subdomain. If you want to develop each subdomain as its own entity, then by all means, do so.  If not, get yourself a main domain name and use that as a certified landing page.

Using MySQL in a Hosting Environment
MySQL is a heavy-duty database server. Used with various software languages, most notably PHP, and part of the LAMP family (which is comprised of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP),

Whether it’s a customer relations management list or medical records, any data you have that needs storing, is stored on a database. You will need a database management system to add, access, edit, and process data in your databases, and MySQL is one of the best and most comprehensive packages on the market. MySQL can also be used as a relational database management system, which means it can store data in various tables that can communicate with one another rather than all in one large “storeroom” of data.

You can run MySQL as a server in your local device or in a remote server. All you need to access your MySQL databases and MySQL functionality is your server name (such as the name server of your MySQL web hosting provider) or the appropriate IP address. You can then input your various commands, most likely using PHP scripts, to interact with your various databases. These commands are written on programming scripts.

When choosing a MySQL web hosting provider, you’ll want to consider some additional factors beyond the standard uptime, backup/redundancy systems, bandwidth, email, and bandwidth concerns.

* Databases: If you’re seeking a MySQL web hosting provider, you’re surely planning on making databases a significant part of your web-presence. You therefore need to find a MySQL hosting provider that offers you at least as many data structures as you might need. A host that promotes itself as a MySQL hosting provider must offer its clients with multiple websites at least five databases.

* Interface: You’ll be working with your databases intimately and frequently. You’ll want a MySQL hosting provider that’s designed its admin interface with the MySQL user in mind. If you have various staff-members involved in the building and maintenance of your various tables and databases, you’ll want to be able to create multiple user I.D.’s to allow varying degrees of secure access. CPanel is a good administrative dashboard to have for MySQL databases.

* CRON support: A cron helps you to run specific scripts for regular, routine tasks to be run at periodic intervals. A MySQL hosting provider should allow you to set up and manage crons from your admin control panel. These scripts are also good for Preventive Maintenance routines.

* PHP Info: The most common script for MySQL databases is PHP. A MySQL hosting provider with PHP extensions enabled is likely to be more frustrating than useful to you. By checking into a prospective MySQL hosting provider’s PHP capabilities, you can ensure compatibility between your scripting language and your database management, thus saving yourself tons of trouble and loads of regrets later on.

Remember, if you are running MySQL databases; make sure that you get a host that specializes in MySQL hosting.

Using Managed Dedicated Web Hosting

Managed dedicated web hosting is for an individual or company that wants storage and bandwidth without the restrictions that you get by choosing a free web hosting service.  If you have a site which you want to have more bells and whistles programmed into it, then managed dedicated hosting is the way to go.

Dedicated services give you more email addresses, sometimes up to 500 addresses. It also has storage to support basic database applications on the server side of the web host. This allows for the development of applications that enable you to store data on the server side also and have queries and other types of program and programming scripts embedded into your web-site.

But the key to these kinds of servers are the bandwidth that’s available to the user. Monthly bandwidth can range from 500 to 1000GB for the user.

That’s good for your basic SOHO business or home office because if you’re running a small audio or flash application or database on your site, this type of hosting service should do just fine. Also, you can assign the other email accounts to co-workers, family members or whoever you want to.

When you are running web applications over 1,000GB, that’s when you should consider steeping up your web hosting package. There are various types of web plans based on the types of internet applications that you are developing for your business. For example, if you are developing online streaming video content for your site, then you might want to go past the 1000GB limit on your account and get more bandwidth.

As a SOHO or company grows, the need for more bandwidth is paramount especially if you have an intranet in your office or you have people accessing the back end of your web-site to load data from various locations.

Dedicated web hosting is what the majority of individuals and small businesses use until they start growing out of their bandwidth. They usually upgrade their web hosting packages and buy more storage and bandwidth.

Using JSP as a Host Server
JSP Hosting Basics
JSP Hosting is a Java hosting program that has many similarities to Microsoft ASP. JSP hosting refers to the ability to run and manage Java Server Pages. Even though Java Server Pages (JSP) is quite similar to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) JSP does have slight differences in the hosting environment.

Java Server Pages is a server-side language that uses simple tag-based codes inserted into HTML and XML to produce dynamic and interactive web pages that are platform independent, meaning that by all rights they should appear exactly the same on every computer screen, regardless of the platform. This is the result when your publish yoy JSP-coded website on a JSP-supported Java hosting provider.

JSP allows web designers combine dynamically generated HTML in with their standard, static HTML code. While most CGI programs require you to compose the entire website in that one program, JSP allows you to compose the dynamic aspects and the static aspects of your site separately.

Java Hosting which includes JSP support would be the logical choice of any web designer wishing to eliminate the irritating need to repeat work they’ve already done. Java hosting, and JSP hosting specifically, would also be an efficient choice for those web designers working with a team.

One of the greatest aspects about JSP is that you don’t need to learn Java to use it and it’s practically built into programs like Macromedia Dreamweaver MX.
JSP’s use a variety of simple tags. The following are some of the most basic and common ones:
* Directives: <%@directive%> Instructions processed when the page is compiled
* Hidden Comments: <–comment–> Document the page, not sent to the client
* Declarations: <%!declaration%> Declare methods or variables with scope throughout the page.
* Expressions: <%=expression%> A bit more complicated to explain, expressions produce results which are then inserted into the output stream at the appropriate place
* Scriptlets: <%scriptlet%> A fragment of code that can access a declared variable and execute it at a defined time.
* Actions: <jsp:action> An XML-style tag that can perform any of a slew of functions

So if you are running JSP, remember that you need to have a host that provides JSP runtime modules on the host side of your web server so that you can run the appropriate scripts.

Using Free Hosting Services
Free web hosting is the most basic web hosting service that you can obtain and there are many free hosting companies that are available on the internet. Free hosting services are usually financed by advertisements on web sites that are hosted.

Free web hosting services are extremely limited. If you get a free hosting service you will have ads on the top and the bottom of your web-site and depending on what your web-site is all about, it may not fit at all but for people starting out on the internet it may be the best option if you don’t have a lot of traffic or just a small site.

The type of web domain that you receive when you get a free web hosting is a subdomain with the name that you pick (yourname.webhost.com) or a name in a directory (yourname.webhost.com). For example, if the name of your free host is freestanding.com,
Then your web domain would be yourbusiness.freestanding.com.

As stated before, if you are a novice, this is the type of account that you would probably want to get but there are some shortcomings to free web hosting if you are looking for more options on the account.

First, many free hosting accounts do not support database management or what you would call in simple terms, putting data structures on the free web host side of their server. Databases are usually used for online data retrieval routines. Many of these free web hosting sites do not support a common package called mySQL which allows you to program queries into your web sites.

They also don’t support multiple e-mail accounts. Most free web hosting service only gives you one email account and it’s usually a web based internet account. The host does not include modules for Flash Programming, PHP and Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (DHMTL).

In summary, free web hosting is for novices who want an easy hosting option without many bells and whistles.

Using cPanel to Manage Your Host Files

CPanel is an easy user-interface site that lets you control your host account environment. The main peculiarity of this operating system is that it so simple to use that your below average computer user can’t mess it up. It’s got great features embedded into its panel and some of the features are listed below.

Site Tools

There are such tools available for your use, which are Web Protect (.htaccess editor), Custom error pages, Redirects, Ability to edit MIME types, Ability to edit Apache handlers, Install/Uninstall FrontPage Extensions, Search engine tool submitting and File Manager.

Email

The email program provides you with the possibility to add, remove, and change passwords while managing email accounts. CPanel is also provided by Webmail for the accounts, Auto responders, Forwarders, Mailing Lists, Spam filtering and some more.

Backup

Backup allows you to create copies of account files and databases.  The backup menu also allows you to download any automatic backups that were downloaded by your CPanel administrator.

Stats

Here are different tools to survey your site popularity and efficiency. Those are Webalizer web stats, Webalizer FTP stats, Analog stats, AWStats, View latest visitors, View bandwidth usage and View error log modules. 

FTP

There is a module that controls FTP accounts (add, remove, change password for its access), Anonymous FTP controls; Ability to change FTP login message and Ability to kill FTP sessions.

Advanced Stuff

You have an ability to add or remove subdomains, Subdomain Redirects and its Stats.

Advanced Tools

You are provided with tools of SSH access tools, Manage GPG keys and Cron jobs.

There are also Pre-Installed CGI Scripts. Those are Interchange Cart, Agora Cart, Bulletin Board, Java Chat, HTML Chat, phpMyChat, CGI Wrapper (for non-suexec installs), Random HTML generator, Advanced Guestbook, Counter Generator, Java Clock Generator, Java Countdown Generator, Secure FormMail clone, CGIEmail, Entropy Search, Entropy Banner. Network Tools are DNS Lookup and Traceroute. Database Management tools includes Managing MySQL databases and phpMyAdmin access.

For beginners, CPanel has a lot of options that are easy to use.   CPanel works with most of browsers, such as IE, Opera, Firefox and others.