Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

In keeping with the oft-disregarded subtitle of this blog, I thought it might be a refreshing change of pace to talk about hosting websites, or even "website hosting," which is, in no way shape or form, a cheap keyword gimmick. What I'll rattle on about today is how what you're hosting will have some bearing on the kind of account you need, and not just simple raw numbers about visitors and transfer. Those numbers are important, but even moreso when you consider what the individuals represented by those numbers are doing when they visit your site.

How Many and How Much They Do

Those numbers, however you want to qualify them (visitors, pageviews, even the ubiquitous 'hits') are, essentially, the baseline, and your site can act as a kind of multiplier. A "multiplier" in this case is something that increases the impact of those numbers; "multiplies" them by a certain value. The more complex a site, the higher the multiplier. It takes more of a web server's "energy" to host a site with forms, databases, forums, scripts, and media, than one lacking any or all those things.

For argument's sake, let's consider a simple, text HTML site, the essential "building block" of the World Wide Web, as a "1". One of the few math-related facts my Liberal Art's educated mind remembers is that numbers multiplied by "1" remain the same. So a site like that will scale well, no matter how many users attempt to access it. If the site is wildly popular, amassing thousands of simultaneous visitors an hour, the web server may not be taxed much at all. The bandwidth bill will remain low, as that text doesn't take up a lot of space as it is transmitted to and fro.

Even "weak" servers could handle serving a page like this to a large number of users without breaking the proverbial digital "sweat." Plain old black-and-white text is what a lot of the web looked like waaaAAAaaay back in the early 90's, when I (shamefully, I admit) was first introduced to the "Internet" via AOL.

It's the mid... "Noughts?" Wow, really need to come up with a better name for this decade.

Anyway, it's the mid-First-Decade-of-the-21st-Century, and we have a lot of new toys to play with on the web. First came images, but the flood gates opened to scripts, databases, server-side programming languages, and full-fledged media, streaming and otherwise. There's really no practical limit to the amount of these elements one can shoehorn onto a web page. All these elements, alone or in some combination, add weight to the page and increase your "multiplier."

Practically speaking, it means the guy running a busy web forum will need more powerful hardware to support the same amount of people as the guy running that text only-web page. There is some scaling involved, of course. If we're talking about 10 people in both cases, then the difference would be negligible. If we're talking about 1,000, or 10,000? Then the difference is acute, and far greater.

Putting Enough Horses Before the Cart

The introduction of shopping carts and similar database driven applications to the web greatly increased its functionality, but it also greatly increased the amount of horsepower required to handle sites employing that technology. Ecommerce hosting is a big culprit, as shopping carts are one of the more complex web apps out there. If your store is sluggish and not responding as quickly as you'd like, then it might be time to reconsider your choice of the smallest budget hosting plan you could find.

Amazon.com does not run off a shared hosting plan, for instance. Even if your ecommerce ambitions are not quite so lofty, you should be prepared to stake out a fully dedicated hosting solution when circumstances demand it. When is that? That's the hard question. It's not the same for everyone, or every website. Some people purposefully build out simple, "light" websites to help it scale as they grow. If you've got a big, media rich site surrounding your shopping cart or forum, then you'll be on the upgrade trail a lot sooner.

Consider the presentation on Google. Very clean, very light, and not a lot of obvious visual bells and whistles keep the site's presentation from becoming a massive hog of system resources. Now, obviously all the background action is a different story. Google's algorithm and applications require enormous power to run and keep all those web pages hitting your screen without any noticeable delay.

Google has different datacenters to better distribute that massive sever load. Sometimes these datacenters are used for testing or have yet to be updated with the latest algorithm changes, which is why you could get different results on the same search in a very short amount of time.

Consider this in terms of our theoretical ecommerce site. The shopping cart is already taxing on the server, it's the big "back end app" that runs the show, kind of like Google's algorithm. You can toss on a rich media presentation to your cart and add the extra weight, just be prepared to deal with the consequences in terms of how well your site will be able handle growth.

Growth Is Good, Just Be Ready to Deal With It

Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying always "go minimalist" if you have a big, app-driven site, be it a cart, forum, or anything else. I'm simply saying that making the choice to have intensive presentation entails a willingness to accept that choice has distinct ramifications in terms of how much power your site requires. It's all about the multiplier. Each element adds to the multiplier. Cart, media, scripts, and anything else over and above that simple text is another addition, large or small.

Listen to your users, test your site. If you think things have "slowed down" recently, see if all that marketing mojo you're working is paying off and your visitors are increasing. If that's the case, then think hard about the upgrade. Despite what a lot of "one-plan-wonder" hosting company's marketing departments will have you believe, a single shared hosting account (no matter what ridiculous amount of resources it provides) will not suffice for every conceivable kind of website.