Need To Know - Choosing Your Web Server Host

Phillip Taysom, Operations Manager At Planet On-Line, Answers The Most Frequently Asked Question When Choosing An ISP To Host Your Web Server

Can you co-locate your own hardware at their end or must you use their hardware?

You may be wanting to take the existing investment you have in a server and simply move it closer to the back-bone. Not all ISPs will allow you to 'co-lo' your hardware. If not, you could be paying over the odds for hardware you already have.

Can you have a choice of operating systems?

Unix is a wonderful operating system for a Web server - but you can't run CGI written in Microsoft's Visual Basic. A common misconception is that it's straight forward to learn to run a Unix host - it isn't. Especially if you're from a Mac or Windows background. Either find a company who'll hold your hand or buy John Levine's "Unix for dummies" and a large jar of coffee.

Will your server be provided with a secure environment?

Many low cost service providers will house your Web server hardware in a non-secure office standard facility. Worse still several who claim to have secure facilities often use third party location houses, where people from all manner of organisations may have unauthorised access to your machine. If you have sensitive data perform a thorough security audit and satisfy yourself before handing over the order.

What provisions are in place in the event of your machine failing?

Modern server hardware should be reliable - but even the best fall over.

You need to ask if the hosting ISP guarantees to have a spare machine available for you in the event of failure? If so, will they take regular backups from which to restore your Web presence? How quickly will they commit to resolving to a failure?

Can you access your server 24 hours a day?

There are stories of ISP's not allowing their customer's access to their machines outside of office hours. If your Internet 'shop front' is closed when people come to buy - that's bad business practice.

Will the ISP restrict your available bandwidth?

One of the main advantages of a co-located server is that it shouldn't be contending with too much other network traffic. A good ISP will house your machine off an Ethernet switch and monitor your bandwidth - either setting an agreed 'cap' or adjusting the monthly charge based on what you've used. This does not cripple your Web site to reduced levels of service. As your site grows in popularity the available bandwidth increases.

Will the service provider give diagnostic help when your server slows down?

A common example is the effect that enabling reverse DNS lookups has on a Web server. It works fine until the load increases - the machine is spending so much of it's time looking up IP addresses it cannot service the volume of Web pages requests - ultimately everything falls apart.

Your ISP should be able to pro-actively identify such problems and help you operate a premium Web service.

Will the ISP provide you with a 'resilient service'?

Provisioning diverse telecoms links, generators, 'in-line UPS' and resilient Lan and Wan hardware infrastructures is a costly business - and generally only a feature of the products offered by the larger ISPs. If you aren't enjoying the benefits these bring then begin counting the power cuts as Winter sets in.

How is the ISP connected to the Internet at large?

Many of the smaller facilities houses will be selling you a share of a downstream link to a primary tier network provider. Often this has only one route (no resilience) and causes problems if their connectivity is not sufficient to cope with the demand being placed on it. If the service provider operates a 'backbone' infrastructure how many points of interconnection do they have?

What level of monitoring will the ISP give you?

A good provider will place application and transmission level monitors on the machine. If the machine crashes you'll either have the problem resolved or be advised - if the HTTPD has gone down - the same. This is an important issue - 3:15pm in Los Angeles is 11:15pm in the UK - if you're trying to use your Web presence to develop new business your server being off-line is a great way to end a beautiful business relationship with a foreign customer. In addition, if your server does decide to fry its hard drive can the ISP have an engineer work on the problem within a few minutes at 3 am on a Sunday morning?; one particularly bad example - a major retailing site's managed machine crashed at 9:24pm on a Saturday night - the ISP concerned could only reply "sorry, we only have technical teams on duty 9 'til 5 Monday to Friday."