AnyHosting

AnyHosting has been in operation for over 8 years now, and we’ve accumulated quite a bit of knowledge (and a lot of opinions) on growing a website while staying within budget.

Following up on my comparison of different hosting technologies,  I’ve created the first post in our AnyHosting Articles section, the Website Lifecycle.

As it states on the main articles page, one of our key principles is to deliver useful, factual information, and not to only push our services, and especially not to push our services where we think someone else is doing better. The decentralized nature of the internet is one of its’ greatest assets, and we certainly use a large number of providers rather than trying to be a one-stop shop.

The number of choices can be pretty daunting, so especially for companies in the early part of the lifecycle, it’s valuable to have a company like AnyHosting to choose and plug together the pieces for you. As your site grows and you get more comfortable with evaluating and plugging together the parts yourself, we tend to move to an advisory/consulting role, and point you at services that we know and trust.

I get a lot of questions from people about what “web hosting” really is, what the difference between virtual hosting/virtual servers/physical servers are, and how to know which one is for them. Here’s a push in the right direction, from the perspective of my hosting company AnyHosting.

AnyHosting recently switched from physical hosting to a virtual private server (VPS) from RimuHosting (great service; I highly recommend them). This means that our servers are much more reliable, and I don’t need to go down to the data center to manage them or troubleshoot and replace hardware as it breaks down (like I have for the previous ~7 years ).

AnyHosting provides virtual hosting to clients, which takes relatively few resources for a web site since they are mostly static web pages. We’ve done email hosting in the past, but have been encouraging everyone to move over to the free version of Google Apps or a similar hosted service, since the spam problem has made it much costlier to host email due to the increased volume and the desire to run resource-intensive (and therefore financially expensive) spam filtering.

Physical versus Virtual Servers

It’s hard to peg down an exact cost per-server for physical servers, but you generally will be paying several hundred dollars per month for the data center storage and power, not including the purchase (or lease) price of the servers.

At ~$15-30/mo (per server), virtual private servers are very attractive for small businesses where virtual web hosting won’t do (for example, the need to host more than web services, such as email or other custom services, a very popular web site, or the need for custom web applications). Hosting and managing your own servers in a data center makes sense if you have the need for a lot of computing resources, but the cost for the data center power, network connectivity, servers, and someone to manage it all can be quite high, so you’ll need to pay close attention to your margins.

Virtual Servers versus Virtual Hosting

At~$5/mo, virtual hosting is a relatively small investment, and allows you to have a basic web presence as well as run simple web applications. In general, your site will be sharing resources with several other sites on the same machine, so you won’t get the same control over response times and ability to handle load for a very popular site.

I normally recommend that small businesses start with virtual hosting, move to a VPS as their needs and popularity increase, and then finally move on to hosting their own servers if it comes to that. A good web hosting company can help you from all stages of the hosting life-cycle, from determining your needs and helping with design and planning, to supporting you as you upgrade from virtual host -> virtual server -> physical server.