Hosting… That old chestnut

Some spiffy sales agent from a supposedly reputable hosting provider recently tried to convince me that he could setup a virtual server within an hour of the request coming through to his desk. With just a subtle amount of scepticism, I thought I’d see if he really could pull off this feat. Having worked largely on the same client’s project for several years, it had been a while since I’d needed to organise hosting for a new client and thought it was about time I did a little digging.

 

OMG – hosting!

Inevitably, every web project comes around to the age old question – what about hosting? Unless you’re smart (or lucky) enough to have infrastructure considered as part of a structured project plan, you’re probably in the same boat as most web clients; coming to the realisation – normally somewhere uncomfortably too late in the development phase – that no hosting contracts have been signed and nothing is in place. It’s time to spin those wheels quickly, or risk an unforseen delay in your project delivery.

Fortunately, the world of hosting has been turned on its head a little in the past few years, with cloud computing coming very much into the mainstream. This advancement alone means that a virtual server can be established in little to no time. It was a bit of a revelation to me recently, that some companies such as Rackspace claim to be able to turn servers around in approximately one hour. None the less, hosting should not be an afterthought, so if you find yourself at the end of the development cycle and wondering all of a sudden where you’re going to place all of those lovely images and finely coded .net scripts… this article is for you.

 

Who you gonna call?

Wiliam as a general rule don’t like to get too involved in hosting. We are not a hosting company (we only host our development sites internally) and our forte is application development, not infrastructure. Despite this, we obviously appreciate that clients sometimes don’t know where to start with hosting and they need someone to turn to.

When any client asks, our Production team are always willing to point you in the right direction. We do not have allegiance with any particular hosting companies – our clients are free to implement whatever hosting arrangements they like. It’s not uncommon for us to review the details of a hosting plan or to even engage a sales agent or account manager on behalf of the client, just to run through the specs, costs and ensure everything is in order. In other words, whilst it’s not generally our job, we’re not going to leave you in the lurch!

 

Which type of hosting?

Being a higher-end bespoke development firm, most of our sites end up on a virtual server or in some form of load balanced environment. But there are other options. Many of our larger, more established clients – especially banks or airlines – will have in-house infrastructure, thanks to the capabilities (and demands) of their large IT departments.

Shared hosting generally isn’t an option for a website that’s churning lots of traffic and orders, or where developers will require full access to the server. Shared hosting restricts this – rightfully considering that there are numerous websites all hosted on the same box, and settings changed for one customer could adversely affect other websites with different configurations.

You’re also sharing the bandwidth with every other website (possibly hundreds) and this is why shared hosting is so extraordinarily cheap.

The payoff is they are great for your Joomla, Wordpress, or simple hand coded, low traffic sites (probably the majority of SME or brochure-ware style websites out there). But in the custom .net development world, we will always tell any client with an existing shared hosting plan, that it’s time to move up in the world.

 

How much again?

Like quoting a website (how long is a piece of string?), your hosting solution will depend on the needs and complexity of your website, hence it is quite variable. Will a single server be enough for everything? If you’re expecting larger traffic volumes, especially where you’re website is heavily data-driven – probably separate web and database servers are necessary. If your client like sending EDMs or are marketing and promoting heavily in other ways, you need to be considerate of whether the hosting will be able to support a rapid ramping up (peak/spike) of traffic.

Then you need to consider up-time. Are you operating a transactional or booking website? Operating within the banking or financial sector, or running time sensitive online campaigns? Or perhaps you’re just from one of those household name organisations with a website ‘too big, too important’ to go down? Time to consider disaster recovery – pretty much duplication of your infrastructure in case of emergency. Finally, how picky is your marketing and legal department? Probably picky enough to want to review everything in a test environment before it goes live to the public. Regardless, good practice is to have not just a development server (like Wiliam) but a UAT and/or staging environment, to check things before you push into production. After all, why be in a hurry to look like an idiot?

A bit like buying a lock for your bicycle (unless you want it stolen, always spend 10% of the value of your bike on the lock), we say as a general rule, a client should expect to pay roughly 5-10% of the website development costs towards their hosting bill in the first 12 months. This will ensure adequate infrastructure to run a fast and secure website with all the trimmings… licenses, SSL certificates, etc.

 

When should I start to panic?

In the days when setting up a server used to involve screwing together a box on demand, things often became a bit time sensitive. Especially if your RAM of choice wasn’t available or the technicians were on holidays. But these days, new, huge data centres are being commissioned around the world over, constantly. Cloud hosting literally can be established with the click of a button. The infrastructure is already setup, you just need to run the software which configures your virtual server – basically your share of ‘the cloud’.

I think the most impressive thing I’ve noticed is how much more control a client has over their hosting infrastructure, now that cloud computing is more mainstream. Web based applications allow the customer to login to their cloud control panel and raise or lower the specs of their hosting, much more easily than was ever possible a few years ago. Need more RAM or want to commission an additional server? Don’t bother calling and paying for a technician’s ‘valuable’ time anymore, just do it yourself and see the relevant upfront and ongoing costs in front of you before you click ‘Go’.

So when a technician tells me they can have a new web and database server setup within the hour, he’s technically correct. Though from my personal experience you should still allow a few days. Spinning up the server may take little time at all but there’s still unavoidable red tape and communication that needs to happen before you can fire up the website. Don’t underestimate how long it can take to agree on the server specs, sign contracts, pass access credentials, delegate domain names and generally jump through your host’s various hoops and hurdles – as well as your own organisation’s red tape.