Choosing a web hosting company for your e-commerce store

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 16, 2004 [3171 views]

Hosting a site, blog or store is much more than simply finding a box and installing software. When the OTHER media started in the business it was common for small companies to host sites inside their own offices. Quickly, however, the demands on hosting increased and we created our own hosting facilities in collaboration with the Vital Group in Park Royal.

Here are some of the web hosting issues that affected how we designed our current hosting architecture:

E-commerce requires security.
We want both physical security (to avoid machines being stolen) and logical security (to prevent hacking). Siting the servers at Vital with appropriate hardware firewalls creates both types.

Scalability.
We need every part of our solution to be scalable and this means bandwidth, harddisk space and processing power. We use load balancing to share out the work across multiple machines.

Redundancy.
We need to make sure that hardware and software failure don’t affect our clients for too long. Multiple load-balanced servers allow single computers or hard disks to fail; other machines will take over while components are replaced.

Cheap web hosting often means shared web hosting.
Sharing a single server between several sites makes sense (particularly if they are small) but you need to make sure that your site gets its fair share of the bandwidth and CPU time.

Microsoft hosting versus linux/unix hosting.
For 5 years the OTHER media ran Windows NT Servers. They were fairly reliable and straightforward to setup but needed careful monitoring and increasingly became vulnerable to hacker attack and viruses. Our new hosting environment (described below) is built around Linux, load-balancing and open-source software components. After 2 years I think we are glad we switched to Linux hosting because of the flexibility it gives us.

Scripting languages.
Running a store requires software to be installed or developed and this can be in a wide range of languages including Perl, PHP, Java and ASP. You need to make sure that your chosen web host can install, serve and provide support for the software you choose.

Installing and configuring your server
Most low cost hosting solutions come with a control panel to allow you to make basic changes to your site, view your traffic stats and control access. Some have sophisticated content management systems while others allow you full “root access” to your files. What level you require will depend on how much you need to customise your store.

Standard versus custom packages
How standard is your implementation? How much do you want to be able to customise the look and feel, the business logic or integrate with other systems? If what you require is simply a basic shop with little customisation then some of the hosted e-commerce packages will probably be sufficient.

Support costs
Beware of very low cost web hosting without being clear about additional support and other charges.

Trusted provider?
Find someone who is using your chosen hosting company and see what problems, costs and issues they have experienced.

Here is an extract from the hosting document we send out with proposals.

This document has been produced to describe our current and planned hosting and support arrangements for customers of the OTHER media . It should explain why our hosting is different from low cost web hotels such as 1-2-1 and FreeHost and why although clients may prefer to arrange their own hosting this will usually prove to be more expensive.

Our current hosting architecture

• designed around the J2EE environment
• separation of data and web serving
• focussed on dedicated application servers rather than static web pages
• highly scalable
• logically and physically secure
• load balancing for optimal traffic throughput
• pre-designed and configured for new clients
• built in redundancy to allow failover of key components
• creates backup archives for all key data
• monitoring and logging of traffic
• intrusion detection and prevention
• SSL certificate management
• Domain name management

Based on

• clustered load balancing servers
• 5 web/application servers (OTHERobjects, OTHERcommerce)
• 2 database servers
• 1 static content server (files, images)
• 3 support servers (mail, DNS, credit card transactions)
• 3 physical firewalls
• 100M connection to the internet

A client wanting to provide their own hosting environment to meet the above specification would have to

1. Purchase or lease sufficient hardware
2. Configure application software
3. Tune load balancing
4. Set up security, payment, firewalls, logging, monitoring etc
5. Set up VPN access
6. Configure transactional servers to communicate securely with 3rd parties

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