Understand Hosting

About hosting

What is hosting? - Hosting is a service that enables businesses to rent or share space on a hosting company’s server(s) in order to carry out its web based activities, including running its website and the functions within it (such as online ordering... [Read More]

The future of hosting - To host your own web activities in house is often an expensive overhead. You would need skilled IT personnel as well as the required hardware and other technology on your premises. Hosting companies provide all of these services and resources as part of their offering... [Read More]

Why hosting - You can achieve many benefits by using a hosting company, from cost reduction to spreading payments for the service on a monthly or quarterly basis. This can make a considerable difference to your overheads as your organisation won’t need to make one major capital outlay... [Read More]

Types of hosting - Free hosting - Some companies offer free hosting facilities but this is generally only suitable for personal use, as these services are often quite basic. The hosting company usually generate their revenue from advertising on their site. Whilst it can be a viable proposition, it is very much a case of ‘you get what you pay for’... [Read More]

Service level agreement - A service level agreement (SLA) is a list of services and objectives that the hosting company agrees to deliver. These terms can differ according to organisation type... [Read More]

Benefits of hosting - Organisations can gain a number of benefits by using a hosting company such as saving money... [Read More]

What type of company would benefit from hosting? - Generally most companies benefit from using a hosting service but this does differ from company to company depending on the requirements... [Read More]

Potential pitfalls - There are a number of risks associated with hosted services that you need to keep in mind. Risk is seen as one of the biggest issues with hosted services... [Read More]

Download ebook

Buying and planning hosting

Six steps to successfully enter into a hosting services agreement - In the initial phase, an organisation must ask questions such as why do we want to work with a hosting company... [Read More]

Points to remember when planning hosting - You must be absolutely clear why you are considering a hosted service. Make sure that terms are defined, objectives are clear and that all parties know exactly what is expected of them... [Read More]

Hosting case studies

No website is an island - Sandy beaches, wooden huts and virtualised, scalable servers with firewalls are not the most likely of combinations, but these can be drawn together as in hosting the Remote Control sub-site of the BBC series Castaway. The Remote Control sub-site, allows viewers to directly influence the actions of the castaways, adding an interactive element to the show.... [Read More - pdf]

Luxury resort Celtic Manor scores a hole-in-one for video performance across the globe - Set in 1,400 acres of parkland in the Usk Valley, Wales, The Celtic Manor Resort uses a combination of text descriptions, high-quality images on its website and has recently commissioned a promotional video featuring a tour of the premises and grounds.... [Read More - pdf]

Leading digital agency Design UK uses virtualisation and ColdFusion to improve speed and reliability of high profile web applications - "We were realising that we needed to update our hosting capabilities in order to stay at the forefront of digital design... [Read More - pdf]

Questions and answers

What is hosting? - Hosting is a service that enables businesses to rent or share space on a hosting company’s server(s) in order to carry out its web based activities, including running its website and the functions within it (such as online ordering).... [Read More]

How does it work in practice? - It works by allowing the resources of under utilised computers to be used by over utilised computers, whilst appearing as one single computer... [Read More]

Why do I need a hosted service and what are the benefits? - To host your own web activities in house is often an expensive overhead. You would need skilled IT personnel as well as the required hardware and other technology on your premises... [Read More]

< Read more questions and answers about hosting.

In summary about hosting

Hosting is a very effective way of reducing costs and providing companies with web based services such as e-commerce that would otherwise be extremely expensive to provide.

However, you must have very clear objectives and ensure that any agreement you enter into is scalable to meet your future business requirements. The hosting service you choose should be flexible to adapt with your changing business requirements. It is best to start with a service that you can upgrade and change at a later date, if or when your business requires you to do so. As revenues increase you can increase your hosting services requirements in line with those changes. This will help you grow your business in manageable steps.

Glossary

Outages - An outage is another term for when a computer system fails or stops working.

Load balancing equipment - Load balancing divides work between two or more computers. The work gets done in the same amount of time without any one computer getting overloaded. You can use hardware, software or a combination of both to achieve better performance of your computers.