This isn’t one of the hundreds of books that will help you write HTML or use Photoshop to design a killer web site. Those are the easy parts. I wrote this book to help you plan for the unglamorous on-going operation and hosting of your site. Specifically, this book explains how to select a web-hosting service or MSP and how to manage that relationship once your site is up and running.

What the Salesdroids Won't Tell You...

Once you decide to outsource your web operations, your choice of a web-hosting service or MSP can have a substantial impact on the reliability, performance, and accessibility of your web site. In other words, selecting a web-hosting service or MSP is risky because the cost of making a wrong decision can be substantial. I want to help you avoid mistakes.

Parts one and two (~70 pages) cover the basics, exploring shared and dedicated web hosting, colocation and managed services in depth. Part three (~100 pages) investigates strategic issues such as loss of control, lock-in and finding a vendor’s sweet spot. I’ve dedicated full chapters to risk management, SLAs, and developing traffic and server scalability models. (The spreadsheets are available on line.) In parts four and five (~200 pages) I focus on technology with chapters on web-site architectures, caching and CDNs, connectivity, storage, backup and recovery, security, monitoring and DNS. I’ve also included a chapter entitled “The Net Detective Toolkit” that will help you research prospective web-hosting services and track down problems when they occur.

Here's the Table of Contents:

• Part 1: Perspectives
  • Web-Hosting Options
  • The Components of Web Hosting
• Part 2: Vendors
  • Comparing the Vendor Categories
  • Shared and Dedicated Servers
  • Colocation
  • Managed Services
• Part 3: Strategies
  • The Dark Side of Outsourcing
  • Getting it Right
  • Risk Management
  • Service Level Agreements
  • Traffic Models
• Part 4: Technologies
  • Web Site Architectures
  • Caching and Content Delivery Networks
  • Connectivity Practices
  • Storage
  • Backup and Recovery
  • Security
• Part 5: Tools
  • Connectivity Performance
  • Monitoring
  • The Net Detective Toolkit
  • Domain Names and DNS
• Appendix
  • Resources

In Part One, Perspectives, we'll look at the web-hosting marketplace and the categories of web-hosting services. We'll also discuss the pros and cons of outsourcing, then look at the relationships of the individual components of web-site operations, and consider which of them should be outsourced.

In Part Two, Vendors, we'll dig deeper into each of the four categories of web-hosting vendors (shared servers, dedicated servers, collocation, and MSPs) and examine the services offered by the vendors in each category. [See Tips]

Part Three, Strategies, addresses a number of issues surrounding the selection and on-going management of a web-hosting service. We'll start with the problems and fears of outsourcing including the risks of lock-in and loss of control. Next we'll consider strategies for successful outsourcing, followed by a formal risk-management process. That will take us into a discussion of SLAs (service level agreements) and some additional strategies such as how to leverage resources shared with other customers, whether it's better to buy, lease, or rent hardware, and how to manage applications and content. This section concludes with the development of web-site traffic models and a discussion of how to use them. [See Tips]

Part Four, Technologies, explores the technical issues beginning with web-site architectures. Next we'll examine caching and CDNs (content delivery networks) and the issues surrounding Internet connectivity practices. . This section concludes with in-depth studies of storage, backup and recovery, and security technologies and strategies. [See Tips]

Part Five, Tools, includes tips on diagnosing connectivity problems, web-site monitoring, a net detective toolkit for researching vendors and, registering and managing domain names and DNS (the domain name service), and references to additional on- and off-line resources. [See Tips]

• OutageLoss.xls (Figure 9.1)
• UptimeROI.xls (Figure 9.3)

Chapter 11, Traffic Models, contains a number of Excel spreadsheets for modeling traffic and other aspects of increasingly complex web sites. They may be downloaded as follows:

• SmallStaticSite.xls (Figures 11.1 and 11.2))
• CacheHits.xls (Figure 11.9)
• LogFileSize.xls (Figure 11.11)
• AveragePeakAndBurst.xls (Figure 11.13)
• WebServerScaling.xls (Figure 11.14)
• AppServerScaling.xls (Figure 11.15)
• Ecommerce.xls (Figure 11.17)
• BigRetailer-1.xls (Figure 11.20)
• BigRetailer-2.xls (Figure 11.21)

Many of the book's recommendations are summarized in Tips. The following pages contain all of the Tips, according to the sections in which they appear in the text:

• Part 2: Vendors
• Part 3: Strategies
• Part 4: Technologies
• Part 5: Tools

Got another tip you think we should add to the list? Email it to tips.

Resources

Click here for the updated and hyperlinked version of Chapter 22, Resources.

Errata

Check here for errata for this book. If you find any additional errors, please send them to doug@rds.com.

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