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 hosts that 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.
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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 other hand, are the first to authenticate
these service guarantees. They usually consult the services of an
established server monitoring services such as NetMechanic, provided by
Keynote Systems.
NetMechanic provides an integrated suite of tools that
detect problems with your Web site. The company's "Server Check Pro" 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 constantly, 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 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, you should
attempt to pull up sites located with 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 PCS Network Tools.
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.
