How do I evaluate a shared Web host?
Finding a decent virtual or shared Web host can only be achieved
by conducting in-depth consumer research and evaluation. Many
tools exist online that can assist the individual and small
business find an extremely reliable hosting service. With the
myriad of choice available, it is necessary for the consumer to
discriminate. Since shared Web hosting is conceived as only a
low-end, low-margin commodity by the industry itself, it is
necessary for the consumer to be very wary. There are literally
thousands of Internet presence providers (IPPs) who offer shared
and virtual Web hosting services. While many provide extremely
good service, others provide service that is less than desirable.
In order to find suitable Web hosts, consumers must conduct due
diligence.
Prospective shared
hosting clients must therefore ensure that they test the technical
capacity of any host thoroughly before they procure their
services. Advanced testing of a potential host will reveal whether
the solutions they provide are reliable enough for your
high-traffic site. Remember that your Web host must be trusted to
provide solid network infrastructure. If you select a host that
cannot provide robust connectivity, then your site's availability
to the world will suffer. For this reason, informed consumers will
evaluate potential hosting firms before they sign-up.
Testing ensures that
consumers will not waste their good money on bad services.
Reliable testing results can be obtained through the use of
sophisticated network tools that monitor hosting performance. Such
tools will determine how often a host's servers experience outages
and will generate a list of probable reasons why hosting services
are unreachable. It is advantageous for you to use such tools to
ensure that the host you select will provide minimum downtime.
Most hosting firms boast about their relentless commitment to
excellent service and server responsiveness, and usually the
crowning jewel of this commitment is 99 per cent uptime.
But while most
hosting operations use this promise of incredible uptime as a hard
sell, few consumers actually test whether these pledges are true.
Smart consumers of hosting services, on the hand, are the first to
authenticate these service guarantees. They usually consult the
services of an established server monitoring companies such as
NetMechanic.
NetMechanic (www.netmechanic.com)
provides an integrated suite of tools that detect problems with
your Web site. The company's "Server Check" product is an
excellent choice for ensuring that your server is up 24 hours a
day. The tool will ping, traceroute and attempt to access your
site via http on a regular basis to verify that your server is up.
For a small fee, the service monitors your servers
round-the-clock, and contacts you by your choice of pager, cell
phone or e-mail when your server goes down. The tool will also
generate specialized performance statistics in real-time, so that
you can monitor outage patterns to ensure that you're getting
quality uptime from your host.
You should also
routinely attempt to check server response from your own computer.
If you are using a regular 56k dial-up connection, then you should
attempt to pull up sites on your prospective host during peak and
non-peak hours. A battery of low-cost tests is available on the
network layer level of your operating system. You can test a
potential hosts' network and server responsiveness from your
MS-DOS or UNIX line prompt. In order to obtain a true
representation of the host's services, you should select Web sites
on your host's network that are typical of the services they
render to their normal clients.
You should thus
avoid testing the host's main Web site or premier customers. These
sites are mission-critical to a hosting firm and thus are afforded
an extremely high level of maintenance, which is not always
representative of typical service.
In order to locate a
typical client of your prospective host, execute a "whois" search.
Whois is an application that looks up critical information about
any Internet domain. This information includes ownership, location
of the host, and most importantly, its block of network numbers.
By executing the "whois -a yourhost.com" command at a UNIX line
prompt, you can search your potential host's entire block of
network numbers, and seek out a normal customer who is hosted on
an individual network address. The customer that you use should
have the approximate services that you seek. Use the ping and
traceroute commands from either your UNIX or DOS prompt to test
server responsiveness. You also can obtain many free or shareware
WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) network tools for the
Windows platform that can test server responsiveness. An excellent
suite of bundled network tools is provided free-of-charge by
CyberKit Technologies (www.cyberkit.net).
Using a line-prompt
or WYSIWYG application, attempt to "ping" sites from the
prospective host on your computer. Ping is the networking
equivalent of sonar. The network tool is used to verify that a
given server is actually reachable, and measures the delay that
occurs when sending a data packet to it and back again.
Executing a "traceroute"
from your computer is also an interesting and informative
experiment to run on a hosting company. Traceroute applications
allow you to map the direction that data travels over the
Internet. By conducting a traceroute, you can determine whether
the data you have requested from your prospective host will take a
direct or indirect path to you. The most successful incident of a
traceroute is therefore when data takes the shortest route to your
computer.
These tests,
conducted manually on a regular 56k connection will give you a
rough indication of your client's response time if you were to
choose the prospective host that your testing. In essence, these
tests determine whether a host provides the lowest level of
network latency, ensuring that data is passed to browsers and
other Internet applications as quickly as possible. Your aim must
be to ensure that the delay between request and response from a
prospective hosting service is as short as possible. Making this
determination is only possible if you conduct serious tests on
prospective hosts before hosting your content there. |
