What is Web Server, Bandwidth,Memory and Network Speed

What is a Web Server?

Generally used in reference to the computer hardware that provides World Wide Web services on the Internet, a Web server includes the hardware, operating system, server software, TCP/IP protocols and the Web site content. Web servers process requests from Browsers for web pages and serves them up via HTTP.

What is HTTP?

HyperText Transfer Protocol - the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web. HTTP defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what action Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. For example, when you enter a URL in your browser, this actually sends an HTTP command to the Web server directing it to fetch and transmit the requested Web page.

What is a Domain Name?

An addressing construct used for identifying and locating computers on the Internet. Domain names provide a system of easy-to-remember Internet addresses, which can be translated by the Domain Name System (DNS) into the numeric addresses (Internet Protocol (IP) numbers) used by a network. (CoffeeCup.com is a domain name as is Google.com)

What does URL stand for?

Uniform Resource Locator - the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web. The first part of the address indicates what protocol to use, and the second part specifies the IP address or the domain name where the resource is located.

What does DNS stand for?

Domain Name System - a system of mapping names to IP addresses. Because domain names are alphabetic, they're easier for humans to remember. The Internet, however, is really based on IP addresses. Every time you use a domain name, DNS translates the name into the corresponding IP address. It is similar to a phonebook for the Internet.

What does FTP stand for?

File Transfer Protocol - Allows the transfer of one or more files from one computer to another across the Internet. Usually from a personal computer to a Server or vice versa.

What is Uploading?

Uploading - Is the transferring of files from your local computer to a remote computer, usually a server.

What is Downloading

Downloading - Is the transferring of files from a remote computer to your local computer.

What is E-Mail

As most people already know E-mail stands for Electronic Mail and is now an integral part of business and personal communication.

What are POP and SMTP servers?

Post Office Protocol is the most common protocol used to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Most e-mail applications (sometimes called an e-mail client) use the POP protocol, although some can use the newer IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). The newest version, POP3, can be used with or without SMTP (an e-mail sending protocol, stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). IMAP servers are similar to POP servers, the only difference being they save the e-mail so they can be retrieved from multiple locations or multiple users.

What is WebMail?

WebMail - Provides the user an interface on the Internet so they can access their e-mail messages from any computer.

What is a CGI Service

CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. CGI provides a method to interface a computer program with an HTML page. CGI programs can be written to do many different things, which includes: counting visitors to your web site; processing data obtained from online forms; and creating simple animations. If you want any of these features it is essential that your host includes a CGI Service usually in the form of a CGI-bin.

What is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth in respect to hosting, is the amount of information that can be transferred from the server to a Browser. Hosts usually limit the amount of bandwidth a user has available per month. As an example, if you had a file on your site that was 1mb and you had 1Gb of bandwidth, users could download the file 1000 total times.

What is Disk Space?

Disk Space - the total physical amount of hard drive space a host allows a user to have.

What is a Dedicated Server?

A Dedicated Server is one that only has a single website running on it. Rather than a shared server which has multiple websites being served up.

Bandwidth, Memory and Network Speed

Bandwidth: This can be, rather misleadingly, two related but different concepts. The bandwidth of a connection or network is the speed capacity that data can go to and from a computer- this is covered further down the page under "Speed". The second meaning of this term is the amount of data going in and out of the server and is normally measured in MB/GB (megabytes/gigabytes) per day/month. Suppose that you have 100MBytes of data on your sever and you transfer it all just once in a day, you will have used a bandwidth of 100MB/day (this is ignoring data that goes into the machine!). The reason that this value can be important is that many hosting companies will have a maximum monthly bandwidth allowance and any amount over this figure will be charged for- like using up all of your free minutes on your cell phone.

For a standard website which has some pages and a few images this is not normally an issue (unless it has an enormous amount of visitors) but if you have a lot of very high resolution images, video clips of file downloading/ sharing the bandwidth ceiling can be reached quite quickly. It is worth calculating the expected bandwidth if you suspect that this may be a problem since you will be charged at a far greater rate if you exceed the allowance. A site I had around 10 years ago cost me $20/month hosting cost and $350 in unexpected over bandwidth fees in the first month!

Memory: The memory allocation you get will normally depend on what you pay for; most hosting companies will provide various packages with varying memory allocation. This is essentially the amount of hard disk space that is allotted to you- you cannot exceed this space. It is easy to find out how much you need if you have your web site on your computer, you simply look at how much space all of your web files take up and allow a bit more for email, statistics and other features of your hosting that may use memory. If you hit the memory limit, most hosting providers will allow you to just upgrade you package to the next level.

Speed: The speed that your web pages will be presented to the visitor depends on a number of factors. First of all it will depend on the server hardware (how good the computer is that is acting as the server). In addition, a hosting package will typically be one of hundreds if not thousands of others on the same machine- the more there are on a single machine the slower the machine will be serving your site's pages during busy periods.

Next is the data speed; which again is made up of many factors. The network speed and topology that the machine is connected in at the hosting companies building, the "pipe" that the hosting company has (which is the data speed in and out of their building and onto the internet) and the connection speed of the person accessing the site (broadband speed/ dial up modem etc.). It is important to not have your site load too slow since people will give up on a page within a few seconds if it is loading slowly.

To ensure that the machine is running quickly enough for the amount of accounts on it you have to rely on the hosting company, some are good and some are bad (in that some companies offer very cheap hosting but overload their servers). For high traffic sites you can move to virtual or dedicated server solutions which we will discuss later on but for most sites it is sufficient to use a good hosting company which does not overload their servers and provides a good data pipe.

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