Website Lifecycle

The idea

Every great web site starts with a great idea. Mockups of the content, a prototype web application, etc. But how do you take that project from the larval stage to a production site able to handle tons of traffic?

Start small

Before you can start driving traffic to your site, you need to have a basic web presence. Virtual hosting is a great place to start, as the price is low (~$5/mo) and doesn't require a large outlay of time or expertise. If you're not going to hire a professional designer from the start, the best advice is to keep it simple. You can also find many free web hosts, but they tend to be ad-supported (requiring you to put ads on your pages that you do not get paid for) or restrict the type of content you can upload. If you want to have total control over the user experience for your web site, the ability to run your own ads if you like, and access to support, it's worth a small investment.

Too big for it's britches

Virtual hosting is not without it's drawbacks; you're not going to get the flexibility to install whatever you need, and sharing the same machine with other budding sites reduces the total number of simultaneous visitors you can have, and makes your response time less predictable.

The next step is one or more Virtual Private Servers, or VPS. This gives you the flexibility to install whatever software you like, without needing to maintain your own machines, power, network connectivity, and maintenance costs. These services go for around $15-$30, and generally include 24-hour uptime guarantees and access to support. If you don't have (and don't want) experience administering your own server, you'll want to find a reputable consultant.

The big leagues

Hosting your own servers in a datacenter. Many companies jump to this stage sooner than need be, but it certainly does give you complete flexibility. The cost is much generally much higher (~$100 or more per month, increasing as you add more servers, power, and network connectivity costs). The benefit is that as you grow you'll want the ability to negotiate deals; your cost per machine goes down as you go from 5 to 10 to 100 servers, which is not something you generally see with the Virtual plans. However, you'll need full-time support in case something goes wrong, and that means either a full-time employee or on-call contractor.

You'll also need to handle your own backups, monitoring, etc. that a virtual host or VPS provider generally handle for you. Again you get more flexibility, but nothing is worse for your site than losing your users' data, or not being there when your user needs you, so you or someone on your staff needs to be sure of your contingency plans.

Where to go from here

How do you choose where to start? A good web hosting company can help you decide where you are in this lifecycle, and how to get to the next step.

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