Generally, ‘serious’ web-hosting requirements demand something more than an ISP or free hosting service can provide. By ‘serious’, I mean both commercial and large-scale or complex non-commercial needs.

Both commercial and non-commercial examples of web hosting services include blog or image hosting, video and/or audio file hosting, email servers or multiplayer video games. These can be paid for by external revenue, generate their own revenue, or any combination of the two.

Commercial sites may not necessarily be driven by Internet business; like personal web pages, they can serve simply as a branding and informational resource, additional marketing all too necessary in the modern business world. However, many companies use websites specifically to manage or generate revenue — and this requires a spacious, secure, and stable server environment.

  • ‘Spaciousness’ is often referred to as ‘scalability’, a word of rather recent coinage that describes how well the space needs can grow with future demands. A truly scalable solution, therefore, is one that can handle increased business for the foreseeable future — and this can often be a problem, or at least a major consideration, when choosing a web hosting service.
  • Security is of paramount importance to anyone whose vital information and money is kept online. When considering a web hosting solution, one must definitely weigh the options regarding security technology, including software and hardware. The main questions are: who has access, who can get access, and how much can be done when (not if) access is achieved?
  • Stability is of course fundamental to any persistent web presence. ‘Uptime’ is the common term for the amount of time that your content can be reached. As any server will require a certain amount of maintenance and upgrades, and it is a rare server indeed that doesn’t suffer from the occasion bout of unplanned downtime, a perfect score of 100% is extremely unrealistic, if not blatantly impossible.

On the next few pages, we’ll examine how different types of web hosting service deal with these issues.