Introduction

At 2and7 Limited we offer a range of web hosting services covering everything from home users through to enterprise size hosting for commercial or charitable organisations.  Whilst we recognise that the majority of you will already be familiar with web hosting terminology, we thought it might be useful to begin to provide more information on the various hosting platforms available and to describe some of the terms used.

We will continue to add to this section of the site over the next couple of weeks, but if you have any specific questions you would like answering just give us a shout.  2and7 Limited can provide all of the hosting service described below and we are happy to talk anyone through their options prior to any formal negotiations.

Shared Hosting

The cheapest kind of web hosting is shared hosting.  This is where you web site is created on a server which contains often hundreds and sometimes thousands of other sites.  The performance of your site is affected by the other sites with which you share the server and hence there are often restrictions over the type of content that you can place on these servers.

Typically, web site owners would not be permitted to stream live video or large video/audio files from the server, since these consume the most resources and server bandwidth, meaning less is available for everyone else using the server.  You typically have no choice as to the server you would like to host your site, as this is automatically assigned when you sign up for a hosting package.

This type of hosting is most suited to home users or businesses who have a requirement for a relatively small or low bandwidth web site where performance has to be acceptable, but not paramount.  This type of hosting also usually provides you with a console through which you can install/remove applications such as WordPress, Joomla, etc and you will be responsible for running your own backup of your site.

Support is via the submission of a ticket to a central helpdesk team who will then co-ordinate this on your behalf and you are unlikely to have any restrictive service level agreement in place.

Dedicated Hosting

If bandwidth is important to your web site or security issues mean that you don’t want to risk sharing disk space then dedicated hosting is the next step up.  In this scenario you purchase your own physical or virtual machine which is not shared with any other web site or user.

This has the advantage of ensuring that all bandwidth assigned to that server is not going to be gobbled up by other web sites.  However, this package requires a more advanced user unless you are going to purchase an appropriate administration service from the hosting provider.

Typically, you will be choose your preferred operating system along with any additional software you may require – e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, etc.  You then connect to the server using applications such as Remote Desktop Connection for Windows servers which then physically logs you onto the server and allows you to control as you would you ordinary desktop.

You are free to install any applications that you like, but you will need to locate the correct software and versions for yourself and you are responsible for installing/uninstalling applications.  You are also responsible for taking your own backups of the server, though this can usually be handled by the web hosting company for an additional fee – as can the administration of the server.

The downside to this form of hosting is that (as with shared hosting) should the server develop a fault then your web site will be unavailable until the fault is rectified or the web site transferred to another server.  You would normally expect to enter into a support contract with the hosting provider that specified a level of availability for your web site with penalties should these be exceeded.

Managed Hosting

An extension to the above would be managed hosting whereby the server hardware is located within your organisation, but continues to be owned and operated by the hosting company who are responsible for administering the equipment and purchasing the appropriate software licences.  The customer would pay a monthly/annual fee to the hosting company for use of their equipment and for the relevant software licences.

The benefit of this approach is that the risk of the server failing is transferred to the hosting company and that the customer need not invest in physical hardware or software licences.  It is also usually possible to vary the number of licences in use on a monthly basis so that should you find you no longer have a need for a particular product, then you can reduce the number of licences in use and hence the monthly cost.  This is not possible if you can purchased the licences, as ownership is not transferrable and hence you would not be able to resell the software licences to recover some of your outlay.

Cloud Hosting

Recently there has been an explosion of cloud hosting services available ranging from Amazon Web Services through to the more familiar Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps, etc.  In cloud hosting, your content and files are stored somewhere with the hosting organisation and often in multiple places to decrease the likelihood that your site will be unavailable.

Products such as Microsoft Office 365 offer familiar Microsoft Office products, but this time available via your web browser.  Files are saved on a virtual drive which can be anywhere within that organisations data centre.  As a result, this technology is very resilient, but the downside is that you are accessing a standard service which is targetted at the largest market share and cannot be customised for your individual requirements without incurring additional cost.

Usage is usually on a per user per month basis, though some advanced cloud hosting providers can also charge you according to the power consumption of the server and the amount of data downloaded from the server.  As with shared hosting, you are sharing the physical hardware with other users and hence although you will be assured near 100% availability you will not usually be guaranteed an equally high level of performance, since this depends upon what other users are doing with the shared resources.

Private Cloud Hosting

This provides the most secure and the most resilient form of hosting available, often by using Virtual Machines spread across a wide number of physical boxes.  In this scenario, the configuration is fully customisable and you would usually pay for a specific number of CPU unit and RAM available.  You are then able to configure these into as many machines as you require.

You would begin by discussing your requirements with the hosting company and agreed upon a basic package which could include features such as:

• a dedicated firewall to put another layer of protection between your data and the Internet;
• administrator function so that the web hosting company maintains your servers for you;
• software licence and installation fees so that your system is ready for you to use within hours of the order being placed;
• load balancing to ensure an even spread of web traffic between two or more servers and keep performance levels up;

In this configuration backups of the servers are taken at regular intervals and should a problem arise with one of more of your virtual servers then new virtual machines can automatically be created and your backups applied.  This limits the outage of your web site to no more than 5 minutes on most occasions.

You can also add monitoring and performance tools which allow you to track your servers in addition to standard monitoring done by the hosting company and choose to receive automatic emails or SMS messages should your system develop a fault.

We are currently construcing quite a few medical research data collection systems based upon this technology which is fully scaleable should you find you need more processing power or memory and hence can expand and contract with your business requirement.