The first thing you should do is make a list of what your current goals are. If you are making a professional site, you’ll need a secure and reliable host. For instance, if you know that your website will reach thousands of people within a few months, perhaps you should find a web hosting package that includes extra bandwidth. You need additional space, especially if visitors are constantly going to be accessing your website. On the other hand, if you are just experimenting, you should stick to the free hosting packages. Geocities or Angel Fire certainly provides a basic package, which will leave you satisfied. After all, you do not need bells and whistles if you aren’t serious about the website in the long run. If you do end up changing your mind, you can always switch services and transfer your website.

Once you have made your decision, you need to find a reputable service. While searching for hosting companies on Google may seem appropriate, it often stems bad results. It is important to remember that just because it is listed on a search engine, doesn’t mean it is 100% safe and legit. Therefore, if you do find a potential company, you should get a second opinion. It is usually smart to join a webmaster related forum like SitePoint to discuss such matters. This way you can hear about other people’s experiences and what companies to avoid. Additional references from friends or family would also be ideal.

After picking a host, you will need to provide your credit card information. For many users, 3ix.org is a favorite, as it rarely charges you much. Surprisingly, there are discount coupon codes you can acquire through the internet, to also help you with your initial fee. Due to the fact that you have to include your private information, it is absolutely crucial to make sure you find a legit business. The last thing you want is to lose any money. Therefore, you should google their name and check out the reviews from fellow users. This will most definitely make all of the difference, especially if you find out that they are a fraud.

For website beginners, web hosting doesn’t have to be difficult or even too time consuming. As long as you find reputable sources, second opinions, and a great easy to use package, you are well on your way to website success. With these instructions in mind, there should be no frustrations or year long debates on what company to use. It is quite simple, once you get in the webmaster’s frame of mind.

All hosting accounts offer a certain amount of disk space that you can use to store all your files. Exactly what is, and isn’t counted towards your disk space usage will vary from host to host; so make sure you check exactly what files you will need to allow for when deciding how much disk quota you will need.

It would be a good idea to have some sort of estimates on what you need for various tasks. How much space will you need for storing your email, web files, databases and log files? By breaking down your usage like this it will be much easier to work out how much space you should go for (once you know exactly what files are counted towards your disk quota).

All plans will certainly include all your web accessible files when calculating disk usage. Some hosts will also choose to include email and/or logs in the quota, which can make estimating your disk space requirements more difficult. While you may have a good idea of the disk space needed for your web files, your email and log file needs change constantly.

Should a host include all types of file storage in the quota, check to see if you can switch off your logs or exclude particular information. If the option is available it will save you a lot of disk space, particularly if you have a busy site. However, if you want to use any statistics package that is available with your hosting, you will need to allow some logging to take place.

If you enable your logs then it is also worth remembering that you might not be able to delete a log file from the server until the server has stopped writing to it. Daily logs are fairly manageable if you remember to log in and download and delete them regularly. Problems with monthly logs can arise if you underestimate your log space needs and you can’t delete the file until the end of the month; which could lead to an extra charge if you aren’t careful.

If your email settings and inboxes are included in your disk quota, it might be an idea to set the maximum size of each mailbox if it is possible. This will save you from storing too much mail on the server and inadvertently going over your limit.

Email Accounts

Email accounts are a common feature of hosting, particularly if you are hosting a domain. Some hosts will let you have control over your mail settings, putting restrictions on mail activities (for example the number of accounts or maximum size of mail boxes) on the server side. Other hosts will do all the set up for you, even though setting up of new mail accounts can be easier than you think with the right software support.

How you configure your email is a matter of personal preference, but there are essentially four main types of mail accounts; POP3, forwarding, aliases and autoresponders.
POP3 accounts are the traditional “inboxes”, you have space on a server to store your mail, allowing you to use an email program to log in and download your mail; each login and password combination usually equates to one account. This works a bit like an office inbox, the mail is left there until you do something with it; if it is full then your mail can’t be stored and bounces.
Forwarding mail accounts are useful if you want to send your mail to a service like SpamCop or other email filter before you receive it. Rather than store it on your mail server, it will redirect all mail to another single email address where it is dealt with appropriately. This kind of account is useful for redirecting your emails to a common POP3 box.
Aliases are names that can be used to identify different types of email account, redirecting them to POP3 mailboxes on the server or other addresses, where they are processed again if necessary. What happens to the emails will depend on whom they are being sent to. A catch all alias is often used to collect and deal with email sent to people or departments not recognised by your mail server.
Autoresponders are not an email account in their own right, however they do have their own email address and simply reply to anyone that emails them for information. They are useful if you want to send out pre-prepared information to people requesting it, as opposed to you replying to all the requests manually.

FTP Access

One other thing that is common amongst paid hosting accounts is FTP access. FTP programs allow you to upload files and to edit and delete your content on the server much more quickly than using a web-based interface. If you are hosting on a *nix system, you will also be able to change your file permission settings using FTP.

One of the better features I’ve seen offered with hosting, is the ability for you to create your own FTP accounts. This is great when you have someone helping out on the site or if you want to share your web space while keeping your user’s files separate from your own. How hosts go about this can vary.

Some hosts will let you act like a mini hosting company, where FTP accounts that you create takes them to a special users folder specifically for their files; keeping them from your main files. Other hosts will allow you to create FTP accounts that you can define exactly which folders they have access to, and exactly what they can (and can’t) do with them.

While having the ability to create multiple FTP accounts may seem trivial if you don’t intend to host other sites on your web space; it can be useful for allowing temporary or permanent access to anyone helping you with your site, without you ever needing to give out your own FTP account details. Now that is a feature worth having!

Disk Space – Knowing how much web space your web site needs and compensating for a bit extra, for growth. For example, if your web site needs 200 MB of disk space, look for the plan which offers at least 250 to 300 MB of web space; this will prevent a large unexpected bill at the end of the month when high priced costs, charged by most web hosts for extra disk space usage, are added on to your bill. As a rule of thumb, an average web site should cost you no more than $1 per 10 MB

Bandwidth – Figure out how much bandwidth (data transfer) your web site uses. As above, ensure you get more bandwidth than your site uses. For example, if your website uses 8GB bandwidth per month, then choose a plan, which offers at least 8 or 10GB bandwidth per month. This again will prevent ‘spikes’ of over usage, leading to higher extra costs. As a reference, an average web site should pay no more than $3 per GB for bandwidth usage.

Block buying – Ask the web host if they have “block buying” facilities for purchasing projected extra disk space or bandwidth. But, be careful, if your web site needs only 2 GB extra bandwidth, you may have to buy an extra package in blocks of 5GB bandwidth; in this case, look for the host which will allow you to purchase extra disk space and bandwidth allowance as per your needs, this is crucial to cost savings

Note: Ensure that you know the over-usage allowance rules; you need to know what happens if your web site uses more disk space or bandwidth than you have been allocated. The web host who informs you of possible over-usage well in advance, allowing you to take measures to reduce or budget for extra usage, is ‘worth their weight in gold’.

Number of web sites – if you have more than one web site, sign up an account with a web host who provides multiple domains hosted on one account; this will work out a lot cheaper than an account per website.

A good tip would be to ask your friends and colleagues if they want to host their websites with you on one account. For example at M6.net a person or persons with 4 websites can save roughly $20 per month by signing up an M6-2, multiple hosting account.

Applications and databases – Ensure that all the applications your web site uses (FrontPage, ASP pages, databases, cgi, PHP, etc.), are supported within the chosen account type. Find out if there are any extra fees for particular applications or associated database support. For example allot of hosts charge extra set-up fees to install FrontPage, which may be avoided by choosing another host offering the same features with no extra costs.

Mail Server – Emails are the lifeblood of your online business. Ensure that you get a sufficient number of email addresses with your own domain name (preferably unlimited); these are necessary for other email features like forwarders, and auto responders, etc. There is no need to pay an extra fee for use of a mail server as many hosts offer this service now for free, within the hosting plan.

Avoid long-term contracts – Many web hosts offer huge discounts on yearly or half yearly payments in advance, this may appear a good way to go, but note how long you are locked in. If possible avoid long-term contracts until you are sure about the services and reliability offered by that particular host. Paying on a monthly basis obviously has its benefits. If there are concerns with your service encouraging you to seek a new host elsewhere, you may lose out on many months of hosting fees when breaking a yearly or half-yearly contract; but, if the necessity arises, a loss of only a few days to close a troublesome account, is preferable.

Thinking ahead with reference to an established plan of action will help you avoid most surprises, and definitely help towards cutting costs, short term or long-term. Work out your growth rate and project future expansions. Keep a good record of past and present bandwidth and web space usage, this will help to project future needs.

Savings are mostly a matter of common sense, but in this industry of high technology most people forget this rule and try to look for the best, most efficient and most expensive technical programs and software to save them a buck or two. As in most businesses good cost effective groundwork is the best start to cutting costs.

That’s becoming increasingly possible, according to some experts. You still must hire somebody to create and update your website. However, prices for hosting your website are falling rapidly, which will enable small businesses to create sites that are more sophisticated. Hosting services provide the computers, or servers, on which your Web site is located.

Most small businesses typically use so-called shared servers in which your website shares a server with the sites of other companies, according to Steve Dauber, vice president of marketing for Ensim. Shared servers typically cost between $10 and $50 a month, he noted.

A better solution is to have your own, dedicated server, but that previously was too expensive for many small companies – typically about $200 a month, according to Dauber. His company develops software to help manage both shared and dedicated servers.

“Now that price is coming down to as little as $100 a month,” Dauber said. “And I’ll bet it’ll get even lower.”

Dedicated servers have many advantages, Dauber said. But, he cautioned, they also create new challenges.

Opportunities and Challenges

Dauber noted that dedicated servers are faster and more secure than shared servers.

“If you are sharing a server and another company’s site gets a lot of traffic, your site will slow down,” Dauber said. “And shared servers aren’t always secure.”

Those are among the reasons that Aaron Byrne, a Web designer for Northeast Wisconsin Technical College in Green Bay, Wis., said his small organization recently switched from a shared to a dedicated server.

Besides the advantages cited by Dauber, Byrne said his hosting service provider is better able to support dedicated servers.

“When issues arise, we get great response time (from the service provider),” Byrne said. “If the Web site goes down for some reason, they’re on it in minutes.”

Perhaps more important, though, Byrne said he can create more sophisticated Web applications and data because of the increased speed and storage capacity of the dedicated server, according to Byrne.

However, one challenge is that dedicated servers are more complex to manage. Byrne, for example, develops websites and, like many developers, is not trained to manage Web servers. Nor is he familiar with Linux, the operating system used by the dedicated server, or Apache, the software that administers the Web site. Large enterprises typically hire personnel for those tasks, a luxury few small businesses have.

As a result, Byrne said he uses Webppliance Basic from Dauber’s company, Ensim, to manage the Web sites hosted on a dedicated server. The product isn’t sold to users like Byrne but many hosting services make it, and products like it, available as a service to users.

“The program (Webppliance Basic) means you don’t have to hire an IT (information technology) person or a consultant,” Byrne said.

“It’s simple enough that you can administer services on the server and do things like restart the server. That’s a two-minute chore that, if you don’t have something like (Webppliance), you have to call somebody in. Now, it’s just a couple of quick clicks.”

Other capabilities of the program include being able to grant permission for those who can upload parts of Web pages, control the size of logs that list server activity and set other server parameters. It operates via a Web browser so anybody with Web access and access rights can use it.

“If I had to learn (Linux), I’d have to go to school for weeks,” he said.

Byrne and Dauber agreed that using a product like Webppliance isn’t for technical neophytes. However, it is usable by those who are interested in technology, even if they have non-technical jobs in a company, they agreed.

Better E-Mail

Dauber predicted that lower prices would lead many, if not most, small businesses to dedicated servers for their websites. However, the rise of dedicated servers has one additional benefit, he noted. They make it easier for small businesses to afford and manage enterprise-level e-mail products like Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Products such as these, which are staples in large enterprises, support group e-mail, calendaring and other functions. In larger enterprises, these applications typically are found on servers located within the company and are managed by internal IT personnel.

However, the lowering price of dedicated servers combined with products like Webppliance Basic, which can manage these products, means that smaller companies will be able to afford such applications. That’s particularly true with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, which Dauber said has more tools than previous versions for operating from dedicated hosted servers.

“Most small companies have their e-mail services hosted (by an Internet Service Provider), but there comes at time when you need something like Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes,” Dauber said. “It’s different for every company, but the sweet spot for that is when companies get to about 50 employees.”

Shared web hosting, no matter how well managed, cannot be 100% reliable and stable. However if you have your own dedicated server you can manage to avoid most of the variables affecting the reliability and stability of a server, commonly experienced by shared hosting accounts; variables such as: overload, bad codes and scripts from other users (especially beginners); and, too many applications and components uploaded, and so on.

On a dedicated server you will install only software and applications you want to use, while on a shared hosting server you will find a host of other software and applications installed for other users.

By the very nature of the account, a dedicated server: reduces your dependency on the web host; and bypasses time delays and possible expenses incurred from these. With dedicated server hosting you can provide instant support to your own clients whenever required, which is not possible if you are on a shared server. A reliable and fast support service is vital for your own business growth just like the stability and reliability you wish for your own website. In business, reliability is reflected through word-of-mouth as one of the most effective promotional activities.

For people with clients, such as Graphic Designers and Web Designers a dedicated server is invaluable. A dedicated server will bring extra income into the studio, not just as a hosting facility, but, as a designer knows only too well, for the extra ‘bread and butter’ income value. If you have 24hour access to your own dedicated server then you can adjust, correct or update a clients website in minutes, allowing you to keep the dollar back in your studio and not in someone else’s. Ready availability results in reduced labour costs for the client, but higher studio-income frequency for the designer. Hence you will see the return of all your regular offline clients, bringing their web work with them.

The need for a dedicated server to your average shared server user is realized when stats tell you: how quickly people left your site because it was taking too much time to download; or how many daily visitors you are down by, because your site was not up. The true negative is the worry of how many lost visitors could have been your future paying-customers. The loss could easily equal the value of the upgrade to a Dedicated Server!

For a business, a website that is quickly downloadable and up all the time gives the visitor encouragement that your service is just as reliable, hence you will be more likely to make a sale. It will also enhance the company’s image and encourage existing customers to refer your service to others. This will result in more sales for less promotion.

If you are serious about your online presence you need to get a Dedicated Server.

Today, I’m going to focus on ONE topic, traffic, and the effects it has on your web site’s hosting. The simple one word answer here is ‘Bandwith’.

By definition, Bandwith is the measurement of data, and the speed at which it flows through the phone lines, cable or DSL lines to tranfer information to and from a web site via your computer.

In relation to your web site hosting, Bandwith measures this flow of data transfer, otherwise termed ‘Traffic’. In plain English, it’s the number of hits you receive to your site; pure volume multiplied by the file sizes included on your pages.

So, if you have an all text based web site, you would be able to receive more traffic, at lower bandwith numbers, than you would if you have a ‘graphics’ intensive page, which would naturally have higher file sizes that are being trasferred from your site to your visitor’s browser.

That’s great Ginger, but how does this effect my hosting?

Well, that depends on your host, and the package you sign up for. For example, most hosting services set an limit on the amount of bandwith they include with your fee per month. Depending on the nature of your site, (graphics intensive vs. lower file sized pages), you should be able to predict how much bandwith you will need.

Case in point; my design site is definately what most would consider a *graphics intensive* web site! I can tell you that most of my pages there are over the recommended file size of 24kbs. From my stats logs, I can see that I receive upwards of 150,000 hits to my site before I reach a total bandwith of 2GBs, which is usually the maximun limit you’ll find on lower scaled hosting packages.

If you know, or predict that you’ll see more hits than that in any given month, you may want to consider shopping for a hosting package that offers a higher maximum of bandwith allowed per month.

Hosting companies that limit your bandwith, charge an additional fee whey you exceed your limits. The average additional cost I’ve found through my research is approximately $3USD per GB…

FYI= 1 GB = 1,000 MB 1 MB = 1,000 KB

So, if you have a bandwith, (aka ‘data transfer’), limit of 2GB, that would equal approximately the same amount of data you can store on 3 CD’s. *whew*

For a more detailed explanation of byte measurements,

visit: http://www.learnthat.com/courses/computer/windows/filesize1.shtml

If you’re building your first web site, and have no idea how much traffic you will generate out of the gate, I would recommend starting with a basic web hosting package. As your site grows in popularity, and your traffic increases, you can always talk to your host about upgrading to a package with higher bandwith limits.

From my own experience, brand new websites usually take about 3-6 months of solid promotion before bandwith becomes an issue. Remember to use a host that provides in-depth statistics reports, and monitor your web site activity regularly. Watch for trends, and base your judgements on your results.

What is ASP?

ASP stands for Active Server Pages. Active Server Pages are HTML pages with embedded ASP scripts that are processed on the server before the page is sent to the user. ASP allows you to create dynamic database driven pages, a user can access data in a database, and interact with page objects such as Active X or Java components.

How does ASP work?

When you type a URL in the Address Box or click on a web page you are asking the web server to send a file to your computer; if the file is standard HTML, then, when your web browser receives the web page it will look exactly the same as it did on the web server. However if an ASP file is sent to your computer from the web server, firstly, the server will run the HTML code; and then, run the ASP code. For example: the ASP code could be the current date, or time; and other such information.

How to find an ASP web host

You will need to find a web host who will host your website on a Windows 2000 server. It is safer to host your ASP pages on a Windows 2000 server as they are more stable and most ASP components work with IIS (Internet Information Services), specific to Windows. You also need to consider if your web site uses a database (e.g. SQL, Access) and then make sure your web host provides support for the type of database your web site uses.

Web servers are the backbone of the web, since they are responsible for serving up every web page you see. Most people take the Internet for granted. It takes a lot of work to do something as simple as display a web page. When you clicked on the link to view this article, a series of smaller operations commenced which, while each is small on their own, all fit together to bring you this brilliantly written composition. But how did it work? What actually had to happen to make this text appear in your web browser?

The first part is the protocol that the web server should communicate with. In this example, the protocol is “http”. This tells the web browser that you wish to communicate with a web server on port 80, which is the port reserved for web page communications.

The second part of the URL is the server address. In our example, the server address is www.jamsoft.biz . This tells the web browser which server it needs to contact in order to retrieve the information you are looking for. The web browser communicates with a domain name server (DNS) to find out the IP Address for the website. All communications on the Internet use IP Addresses for communications. The website names that we know and love were invented just to make it easier for us to find the websites we need. Imagine if the only way to surf the Internet required that we remember IP Addresses for each site that we visit frequently.

The third part of the URL is the resource you want to see. In our case, we are looking for the page “about.asp”.

The web browser, having found the IP Address it needs by communicating with the name server, then sends a request directly to the web server, using port 80, asking for the file “about.asp”. The web server sends the html for this page back to your web browser, which reads the HTML tags and formats them for viewing on your screen. If there are additional files needed in order to show the web page (like some images, for example) the web browser makes additional requests for each of these. It is not uncommon for a single web page request to trigger 5 or more separate file requests from a web server.

That is a quick explanation of how a web browser communicates with a web server to display the pages you view on the web. While this explanation is complete by itself, a little extra understanding never hurt anyone. To this point, I would like to discuss protocols and IP Addresses in more detail.

As I mentioned, the first part of a URL is usually the protocol that you would like to communicate. The protocol is the special set of rules that end points in a telecommunication connection use when they communicate. The protocol in this case tells us two things. First, part of the protocol definition is which port communications are going to take place on. All Internet communications take place on different ports, and each port typically handles one kind of protocol. For example, HTTP (hypertext protocol) uses port 80 to communicate, whereas FTP (file transfer protocol) communicates on port 21. The second thing the protocol determines is the actual format of the communications. Each protocol has a different purpose, and the communication format is different for each of these specific protocols. The protocol part of a URL tells your web browser what port to communicate on and how the communication is to be formatted.

When describing the process above, I mentioned that all communications on the Internet use IP Addresses to work but I didn’t describe what exactly an IP Address is.

An IP address is a 32-bit numeric address written as four numbers separated by periods. Each of the four numbers can be from 0 to 255, an example would be 192.168.0.5 . The IP address identifies a sender or receiver of information across the Internet. When you request an HTML page or send e-mail the Internet Protocol part of TCP/IP includes your IP address in the message (actually, in each of the packets if more than one is required) and sends it to the IP address of the server to which you wish to communicate. The recipient can see the IP address of the Web page requestor or the e-mail sender and can respond by sending another message using the IP address it received. Each machine on the Internet is assigned a unique IP Address for the purposes of communication.

By using the protocol and the IP Address specified by the first two parts of the URL, your web browser is able to request the information specified in the third part from the correct web server. This is the foundation that the World Wide Web is built on.

In computer networks, bandwidth is often used as a synonym for data transfer rate – the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another in a given time period (usually a second). This kind of bandwidth is usually expressed in bits (of data) per second (bps). Occasionally, it’s expressed as bytes per second (Bps). A modem that works at 57,600 bps has twice the bandwidth of a modem that works at 28,800 bps. In general, a link with a high bandwidth is one that may be able to carry enough information to sustain the succession of images in a video presentation.

It should be remembered that a real communications path usually consists of a succession of links, each with its own bandwidth. If one of these is much slower than the rest, it is said to be a bandwidth bottleneck.

Wasted Bandwidth

A full page of English text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 15,000 bits in one second. Full-motion full-screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression. Some points have narrow bandwidth (indicating not much information can flow through at one time), and others have high bandwidth (indicating a great deal of information can flow through at one time). This term is commonly used in reference to “wasted bandwidth,” indicating that some (or most) of the information flowing by a point is of no use to a user. “Wasted bandwidth” might include overloading a site’s network connection (thus curtailing other users’ use of the lines) or including lengthy signature files in Usenet postings or discussion groups. “Wasted bandwidth” is often relative: What one person views as wasteful might be essential to someone else.

How much bandwidth do I need?

When choosing a host, the amount of bandwidth you choose to purchase can be crucial to the success of your site. Generally speaking, the more amount of bandwidth you have, the more traffic your site will be able to handle at one time.

To determine how much bandwidth you will need, you must estimate how big each page on your site is and how many people are going to view it. To do this, add up the size of every image on the page and the size of the page’s HTML files, and multiply that by the amount of views for that page you expect per month. For example, if you had three 10k images on your page and a 2k HTML file, you would have 32k of data on that page. Multiply that by your expected page views (let’s say in this case it is 100,000 per month), and you get 3.2 G of data to be transferred that month for that page. Now calculate this for each page, and you will know approximately how much bandwidth your entire site requires.

How can I save bandwidth?

There are a number of ways to optimize your bandwidth usage. First and foremost, keep your pages small as possible. This means tight HTML programming to reduce file size, and compacting your pictures and graphics to reduce image size (NetMechanic has a free, easy-to- use file compression utility). Use the JPEG image format for your photos and the GIF format for graphics, as their compression abilities are second to none.

Take a look at Dr. HTML’s site for some useful tools that will analyze your site’s image sizes, transfer amounts, table structure and more.

Another way to save bandwidth is to use photos and images on your site that are actually stored elsewhere. You can do this by replacing the file name in your IMG SRC tag with a URL. Before doing this, however, make sure you have the permission of the site you are linking to. Otherwise, you are “stealing bandwidth”, which is considered pirating and is therefore illegal (for more information, see “preventing bandwidth theft” below).

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is also an effective way to save bandwidth. It is designed to reduce HTML file size by attributing values for any HTML element/command at the beginning of the document.

Preventing bandwidth theft

Using another site’s images by linking to them in your IMG SRC tag without permission means is a form of double piracy; that is, you are pirating both the site’s image and bandwidth. As unethical as it may be, it is a reality many webmasters have to deal with on a daily basis.

The most basic method of preventing bandwidth theft is policing. This entails analyzing search engines, logs and other sites to find out who is using your images (and therefore your bandwidth) without permission. Once you have located the offending party/parties, you can contact them and order them to stop linking to your site (if they try to feed you a story about everything on the Internet being in the “public domain”, don’t buy it). Unfortunately, policing sites yourself is a time-consuming task.

Related resources

How to Reduce Web Hosting Bandwidth Usage
Using too much bandwidth on your hosting plan will result in paying higher fees. Learn how to cut your bandwidth usage and save money.

Bandwidth Or Data Transfer
Too often web hosts talk about bandwidth and data transfer in the same breath but truth be known they are different although very closely related. Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred at a time and data transfer is how much data is being transferred.

Bandwidth Or Data Transfer – Which is Which?
Too often web hosts talk about bandwidth and data transfer in the same breath but truth be known they are different although very closely related. Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred at a time and data transfer is how much data is being transferred.

In addition to providing rack space and managing servers and storage, many hosting service providers also look to manage the applications that run on their customers’ Web sites. Reliability is critical in the Web hosting arena, and competitive pressures are even driving a few hosting providers to make unrealistic promises. In February, for example, Electronic Data Systems offered a service level agreement that promised 100 percent availability for Web sites and applications that EDS is hosting. This is raising the bar pretty high.

Other service providers have often promised 99.99 percent (commonly referred to as “four nines”) uptime, which gives them a cushion of about 53 minutes of outage time a year when they can down the servers briefly for regularly scheduled maintenance. A few have even touted “five nines,” or 99.999 percent availability, which narrows the margin for error considerably.

While these claims are suspect in their own right, promising 100 percent uptime seems to be over-reaching a little bit further. Even if you offer “nines to the nth degree” availability, you’re still not going so far as guaranteeing 100 percent availability. One hundred percent availability doesn’t leave much room for mistakes and disasters, especially these days when there’s so much for Webmasters to worry about, from cyberterrorism threats to over-subscribed Webcasts that overload the server.

We all know that Internet connections go down, that Web sites become temporarily unavailable or fall prey to denial of service attacks. It’s not uncommon for an errant Java script to crash a Web application. Indeed, EDS seems to be hedging the uninterrupted claim, backing the offer with a “time-to-repair commitment as short as 15 minutes for fully redundant systems” and providing service credits that accumulate from the first minute of downtime. That’s certainly comforting if you’re worried that the actual uptime might fall a little short of the 100 percent mark.

The “fully redundant” part also sounds a little fishy. Does that mean you have an extra hard drive mirroring your hard drive, and maybe a third drive just for grins? How about an extra server mirroring your server, and uninterruptible power supplies backing up the electricity for the servers, disk arrays, and air conditioner, and while you’re at it, an extra system administrator so one of them can go to lunch.

The Web hosting market has grown more competitive with today’s economic slowdown. With fewer companies launching Web sites and scaling back plans for multimedia Webcasts and similar brand-building and bandwidth-hogging activities, hosting providers have needed to focus on niche industries and promote unique capabilities to differentiate themselves.

The claim of perfect uptime is one such strategy. So 100 percent uptime doesn’t necessarily mean availability around the clock 24/7/365. You can just see EDS founder Ross Perot snickering about that bit of slick salesmanship.

Old Ross moved on from EDS years ago to hang out with Larry King, but his spirit still lives on. And you can just hear the “giant sucking sound,” as Perot put it, while this claim deflates on its own dubious merits.