What is Web Hosting

Once you have developed a website you will need a place for this website to reside that can be accessed by numerous amounts of visitors at any given time of the day. In order for this to happen, the server (computer) that your website is hosted on needs to have hard disk space and connectivity that is able to provide sufficient delivery speed to your website visitors. The hard disk space that you will require is based on the file size of your website, most business websites can be hosted on 50 Megs or less of space. The more images and pictures you have in your website, the larger the file size will be. Text on the other hand is usually very small in file size and is transferred rather quickly.

Now that your website is “sitting” on a server, you will need bandwidth (connectivity to the Internet) that is capable of letting all of your visitors access your website file at the same time if necessary. This bandwidth is usually provided to you by a professional hosting company or an ISP (Internet Service Provider) and is connected 24 hours a day. Every time a visitor enters your website they are actually requesting files to be transferred to their computer. These requests and deliveries can require a tremendous amount of bandwidth from your hosting provider that needs to be paid for.

We have created a redundant network located in central Connnecticut. Redundant basically means that if one point fails, or stops working in the network, another system is in place to pick up after a given amount of time. This time is usualy measured in seconds or minutes. Our network consists of 2 seperate circuts. Our primary circut is routed through a brand new, state of the art, fiber circuit, straight thru to Boston, Ma. This circut consists of a DS3 internet connection, capable of handling 45 MBps., or about 28 T1 connections wrapped up together. Our secondary circut, or failover system is dual T1's, and is run through a different network on solid copper lines to New York City, to achieve true redundancy. The secondary network automatically picks up and begin providing bandwith on the failure of the primary circuit. These circuts are controlled by seperate Cisco routers to again avoid that single point of failure. All of our hosting packages take full advantage of our reduandant networks.

Hosting companys all provide "packages" to better serve you.No matter what package you choose, your invoice will include most of the following items in them. While these items are not usually line item listings, the list below will better help you understand the costs involved with hosting

• Domain Name Services (DNS) 
• Software licenses and upgrades 
• Amount of hard drive space used 
• Amount of bandwidth used (constant internet connection) 
• Facility overhead (rent, electric, phone, etc..) 
• Security and continuing education to help avoid new viruses and hackers 
• Backup systems and Maintenance 
• Manpower and technicians 
• A fair profit for the company