Broadband

An operating system functions largely out of sight, or at least is supposed to. It doesn’t matter to non-geeks how a file gets stored, or how memory is used, or how simultaneous processes share the limited resources available on a computer. These are among the basic functions of any operating system.

Yet, you can find very passionate supporters - who offer very detailed lists of pros and cons - for every operating system. Why? Because, though the low-level functions of an operating system do their work out of sight, there are many other features that rise to visibility. Sometimes, they do so when they’re not supposed to.

Weighing the pros and cons objectively could consume a book. But to select a web hosting operating system, a manageable level of considerations apply. They can be weighed even by those who don’t know a processor queue from a pool cue.

For most web site owners, administering the site/server is just overhead. It’s not something they take pleasure in doing and they have plenty of other things to worry about. Many wouldn’t know how and have no interest in learning (rightly so, given their priorities). Consequently, ease of administration is paramount for such people.

Whether a Unix-based site (usually Linux these days) is easier to administer than Windows depends on your current skill set and the type of tools and level of access the web hosting company provides. But in general Linux is more difficult to install and maintain than Windows and the learning curve is steeper.

A very important part of any web hosting company is reliability. A lot of power is worthless if it’s cut often. Outages are a normal part of business. Even Google and Microsoft go down from time to time. The difference is, it happens rarely and they have contingency plans in place to deal with it if the need arises. That means, if their site/system does go down it’s either up again in a flash, or you never see the outage because a backup system kicks in automatically and seamlessly.

Be sure to grill the company closely about their up time. They’ll often tout 99.6%, or some such figure. But, like the on-time figures of the airlines, those numbers can be shaded by adjusting the definition of ‘up time’. What matters to you is whether your visitors will be able to reach your site at any time of the day or night they might want to.

Find out what systems, both technical and human, they have in place to deal with failures of all sorts. Servers can go down, networks can fail, and hard disks can become defective and lose data even when the other components continue to work fine. The result is YOUR site is unavailable, which is all that matters to you. The web hosting company should be able to deal with all of that and have you up again very quickly.

In one sense, detailing the statement in the title would require at least a book. In another sense, it can’t be fully explained at all, since there’s no central authority that designs or implements the highly distributed entity called The Internet. But the basics can certainly be outlined, simply and briefly. And it’s in the interest of any novice web site owner to have some idea of how their tree fits into that gigantic forest, full of complex paths, that is called the Internet.

The analogy to a forest is not far off. Every computer is a single plant, sometimes a little bush sometimes a mighty tree. A percentage, to be sure, are weeds we could do without. In networking terminology, the individual plants are called ‘nodes’ and each one has a domain name and IP address. Connecting those nodes are paths.

The Internet, taken in total, is just the collection of all those plants and the pieces that allow for their interconnections - all the nodes and the paths between them. Servers and clients (desktop computers, laptops, PDAs, cell phones and more) make up the most visible parts of the Internet. They store information and programs that make the data accessible. But behind the scenes there are vitally important components - both hardware and software - that make the entire mesh possible and useful for web hosting.

As with many purchases, our first impulse when selecting a web hosting company is to go with the cheapest. Hey, they’re all alike, why pay more? On the contrary, there are quite a number of objective criteria that separates one web hosting company from another and money is only one of them. Selecting a company based on price alone is equivalent to selecting an auto mechanic on price alone.

The first consideration you should have is ‘horsepower’. Does the web hosting company in question have the capacity to carry your load and deliver decent performance? Most hosting companies will advertise that they have huge bandwidth and hundreds of servers. They are usually telling the truth, however there is also a difference between existing capacity and usable capacity. These are just a few of the numerous choices you have to make when choosing a web hosting company.