Website Hosting
Websites live in the internet. Web hosting is the service to provide the internet space to accommodate your website.
Technology
WordPress uses PHP and MySQL
WordPress uses a programming language called Hypertext Preprocessor (‘PHP’). It also uses a database system called ‘MySQL‘. The web hosting service needs to provide these systems to enable your WordPress site to operate.
PHP and MySQL are also typically related to the Apache Web Server, an open-source web server system. This in turn typically runs in a Unix server.
So your WordPress website would typically operate on a Unix server that is running the Apache webserver software. The Unix server will also need to be connected to the internet so your web site can be visited by people across the internet.
Web Server Performance
To ensure your website responses to visitors clicks quickly, the webserver needs to:
- be fast, even under load
- have a fast internet connection
In the real world, a web server can have 10’s, 100’s or even thousands of websites operating on them concurrently. Consequently, web servers can be extremely powerful computers, with each website using a thin slice of its overall performance.
Unfortunately, low-cost hosting providers need to heavily load their web servers to recoup costs to maintain their low prices.
If the server bogs down due to load, all of the websites contained in that server also slow down. As website page load time is now an important Google ranking factor, a website on a slower server will loose rank, and indirectly cost the business money in lost sales.
Our servers have a dynamic performance capability, enabling them to automatically draw on extra resources during peak load times. This ensures our client’s websites continue to operate under a wide variety of load conditions.
Web Server Reliability
The web server’s reliability is vitally important to ensure your website is operating when a client tries to visit the website. If your site is down, then the visitor is not going to engage with your website and has little possibility of buying from you either.
An unreliable web server also reflects on your businesses creditability.
Our web servers operate on a 99.98% uptime.
Web Server Configurations
There are a number of web server configurations to try deliver on the demanding performance and reliability requirements, :
Shared Server
This is the cheapest and simplest form of web server. All websites on the server compete for the server’s resources. If one website is very busy and demands more of the shared server’s resources, then the other websites have fewer resources and so will run slower.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
A VPS is a ‘virtual server‘ that uses partitioning software to limit the maximum resource an individual website can use. Hence adjoining virtual servers don’t compete for resources, as they have a ‘reserved’ slice of system resources.
Of course, if multiple websites are installed within the same VPS segment, then they still compete with each other for resources in the same way a Shared Server does.
Cloud Server
A Cloud Server is similar to a VPS except it uses a cloud computing environment rather than a dedicated physical machine. This provides significant resourcing and redundancy advantages over the other server options discussed here.