Tech
Hosting part 1: what are my options?.
So many ways to host your app, so we've broken that down a bit.
Tomislav Simnett
2 min read
There are so many ways to host your app, so we've broken that down a bit.
This article is part of a series of 3 blogs, that goes into the details you need to make sure your website is hosted on hardware that makes sense.
Understanding your website
I’d say it’s useful to have some idea on how you might host a website you’re building and to do that you’d need some idea of how many people you’re expecting to visit, how many people you’re expecting to buy from it (if it’s a site that sells things) or interact with it. Usually, this should come from the business case for a particular project, which will either be decided by the client or by the strategist developing the campaign.
Hosting options when getting your site live
There are a number of options you can choose from when it comes to actually get your site up on the web, and each has its advantages and pitfalls. How do you choose, and how do you make sure the people who are building the technical infrastructure of the site are providing the right solution for the specific requirements of the project?
Understanding the process
For clarity, it is important to remember that there are a couple of main groups of people involved in building a website from a technical standpoint: Developers, who would be building the project, and System Administrators, who would administer the hardware platform on which the application or website sits. For the site to function adequately, the hardware specified has to be sufficient for any strategic goals devised by the account teams or the client to be met. That means two things are absolutely imperative in making sure any hardware platform is going to work for any given project: planning and consultation.
The ideal way of working is that the developers would plan their software stack, providing this to the system administrators who, in consultation with both the accounts team and the developers would come up with a hardware platform that suits both the requirements of the software and the ability to achieve the business goals set.
Final steps on hosting your site
Once you’ve got the basic parts of this, you then have to make a choice: Dedicated hosting, virtual hosting, shared hosting, or cloud hosting? I’ll dismiss shared hosting for all but the smallest of sites with no security concerns. Every project should have its own hosting platform uncontaminated by other elements. This means the underlying software can’t change and break your application because someone else upgraded theirs, and other sites hosted on a non-shared platform can’t access each other’s data.
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