This site is an accumulation of information regarding web hosting. It's meant to offer general hosting and web development information as well as a testing mechanism for dynamically demonstrating web hosting providers uptime. We hope you find the information helpful, and invite you to share your own experiences: good, bad, or indifferent. Please let us know if you have suggestions for improvements to any of the tests or information here. Thanks.
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Web Hosting Basics -- Uptime Testing
05/12/08 : Welcome to www.host-test.4t.com. Thanks for your visit.
What is Web Hosting
Web Hosting Basics...
"What is web hosting?"
Web hosting comes in different shapes and sizes.
The major categories are:
Shared Web Hosting,
Virtual Private Hosting and
Dedicated Hosting.
Within those categories you find subcategories such as ecommerce hosting and
rich media hosting.
At a basic level, the major category differences break down between cost and performance.
Higher cost usually means higher performance, more tools and more resources.
Higher performance often means increased maintenance on your part, though even higher
costs might mitigate this.
On a cost basis, shared hosting is always the least expensive....
Shared hosting is generally
aimed at beginners and intermediate users (though if your specific application doesn't require
CGI or database access advanced users can save tons of money with shared hosting). As the name
implies, Shared hosting is "sharing" the hosting enviroment. Usually your web site lives in
a folder along side many other folks web sites, and the same web server process serves up
all of the those sites on request. This means any site in a shared enviroment that acts
as a bandwidth hog will take CPU and disk access time away from other neighboring sites
in the enviroment. Many shared hosting providers work to mitigate these circumstances
by controlling the bandwidth, file sizes and overall resource usage available to any one
site. Upgrades in a shared hosting enviroment generally consist of making additional
bandwidth, file size and CGI access available... basically allowing you to take up a
higher priority among your neighbors. All in all this is a very good balance of cost
versus performance.
Continuing the cost analysis angle; Virtual private hosting is the next major step up...
It's the stop gap between shared and dedicated hosting.
Virtual hosting still shares a machine or disk, but the web server software and indeed the
entire operating system enviroment is usually isolated for each site in a virtual hosting
enviroment. So, you might have a computer or disk with 10 sites on it, 10 different web servers
for those sites, and 10 isolated operating enviroments. The advantages include better control
of resource allocation and more enforceable distribution (ie. neighbors who hog CPU and disk
time in a shared enviroment have a more tightly controlled allocation of CPU and disk time in a virtual
private server enviroment, so the number of cycles available to your processes are not
diminished... here folks don't have to compete for each second, the allotments are usually fixed).
Another advantage is that you usually have robust CGI and
database accessibility... and if you have a CGI that accidentally runs an infinite loop,
it won't suck up your neighbors CPU bandwidth allocations since the operating system enviroment
is isolated. (Consider this same scenario in a shared hosting enviroment where your
CGI's infinite loop might lock up the system and prevent any other site in that shared
enviroment from being served either.... very very bad!)
At the top of the cost pyramid is dedicated hosting....
This usually requires you have
considerable technical skills at your disposal. Dedicated hosting basically means you have
the whole machine or disk to yourself. It also can mean that when your web server falls down,
you will have to restart it. Worse, it can mean if your site gets DDOS attacked that you
might have to manage most if not all of the strategy to mitigate the attack. While
shared hosting providers don't tend to highlight this facet, when one of their sites gets DOS'd,
because it impacts the rest of the sites in their enviroment, they are highly motivated
to mitigate the attack, and likely have highly skilled administrators available to do so.
This is often a hidden advantage to hosting in a shared (or even a virtual private)
enviroment. However, if your site is a frequent target of DOS attacks, your relationship
with your hosting provider may be strained to the point of you being booted, or you
being charged specifically to help offset the special costs associated with managing your
site and it's impact on the rest of the shared users.
Enough with the salad, lets get to the details...
Web Hosting NewsCommunity Architect -- Web hosting is a competitive market place, made more so by the plethora of mini hosting providers that exist as result of participating in a web hosting reseller program. Community Architect is one such reseller program. They haven't been accepting new resellers during the years they've been owned by United Online. But, prior to being sold off from About.com, they'd signed up quite a few partners that still offer free and paid web hosting packages powered by Community Architect. Starting as North Sky, Inc. Community Architect was acquired by About.com (NASDAQ: BOUT) sometime in the year 2000, which was later aquired by Primedia (NYSE: PRM). In 2004 United Online (NASDAQ: UNTD) the parent company formed by the combination of NetZero and Juno, and later BlueLight bought the Community Architect business unit of About.com from Primedia. The amount of interest companies have shown in this property seems to speak well of it's viability in contributing to their bottom lines, or so one would hope. That such free hosting power houses as FreeServers and 50megs host on Community Architect's platform seems very strong endorsement indeed. Both of those properties have been around for almost ten years now. And in a competitive environment like hosting that's saying something. Some of the partners offering services powered by Community Architect include, 00Server, 20M, Draze, Bappy, CyberBREE, eShire, FanSpace, FreeWebTools, TecBox, and WorldBreak to name a few. The Community Architect shared hosting platform allows an owner of a domain to offer subdomain addresses (for example "bappy.com" can offer "mysite.bappy.com" with it's own document root and user rights separate from the bappy.com domain itself). If the owner of the domain doesn't want to offer subdomains, they can offer domain transfers or new domain registration. (Domain transfer meaning the primary and secondary name servers being pointed at the Community Architect name servers... not actually a transfer of registar). Packages include a range of price points and features which easily cover inexperienced beginners with simple applications in mind up through CGI and Database users wanting to do something decidedly more advanced. Perhaps most enticing is even the ability to offer free web hosting to get fence sitters to dive in and hopefully upgrade to a paid offering when they discover how useful a web site can be. This is an effort to provide an ongoing feedback mechanism to existing webmasters, webmasters who might be shopping for a host or partnership, and anyone interested in Community Architect's web hosting products or services. If you are looking for an inexpensive place to build a personal web site, check out the web hosting services offered by 4t.com. Update: If you have a Community Architect partnership established, and want to extend your brand beyond the basic options available through web interfaces, you can find additional information here. Community Architect Partners
Here are some web hosting providers powered by Community Architect.
Community Architect Web Hosting Test Map
Here is a list of current sites being used to test the member site response from a collection
of web hosting providers. (This differs from other web hosting tests which focus on whether
the web hosting provider's home page is serving... that doesn't really help the members
hosting there... people care that their own sites are serving. This tests random sites
in both the paid hosting and free web space category to make sure they serve reliably
and to test the speed of the response which is possibly because most of these test sites
build from the same data source and thus the response times and connections should be
very similar when testing one against its neighbors.) Please note: Not all of the web hosting providers
represented herein offer the same set of features. An exception list is used to try and
control for that factor. Please report any discrepancies, and particularly, any site that
fails to respond (include a time stamp for troubleshooting.) Report any problems to
the webmaster.
Website Building Resources
Here are some additional web hosting and web design related resources.
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