Finding your nearest hosting provider

Posted: 2 December 2008

I'm often asked by prospective neatComponents users where they should host their servers. I could easily reel off the names of some decent co-location specialists, but that's not the best way to approach the problem – first, you need to know what you need from your hosting. And armed with those answers, you have a chance to sensibly assess the options.

I'll be coming back to this whole issue from various angles in future, but today let's start with bandwidth. Most colos offer unlimited bandwidth, or limits so high they are effectively not there. But bear with me, there's a point to this question. First off, we need to know how many page hits you get per day, and then we need to know how big – in terms of bytes – those pages are. We don't need to be totally accurate with these figures, as we're only after a ballpark answer to demonstrate the order of magnitude.

So imagine you have a site which gets 10,000 page hits a day, and with 100KB of content per page. That works out at 1GB of bandwidth per day, and is typical of an established website for a successful small business.

Now back to the question: where do you put your site? You can see from the numbers above that almost any colo will be able to provide suitable hosting – 1GB of bandwidth is 'nothing' for them, but to get started, there might be an even cheaper alternative: host it yourself! As long as your ISP provides you with a static IP address (ie one that says the same each time you reconnect) you should be able to host from your own office. Take a spare machine (or create a Virtual Server on one), install Windows 2003 Server and neatComponents on it – there are free trials of both available, and you have a start-up server for no cost at all.

You still need to think about backups, and obviously if your internet connection is unreliable it's not going to work well, but this is a great way to get started without any financial outlay.

Once you outgrow this, you can easily export your neatComponents sites and move them to a 'proper' collocated server.