CEMIT Ireland

Hosting a website involves a number of different factors, each of which can have a significant impact upon its overall success.

Key factors include:

• the site functionality - the range of features it offers, the ways in which it presents content to the user, and how the content is kept fresh and updated
• the performance of the site - the speed at which it loads pages and responds to user requests
• the reliability of the site - how high the availability of the site is and how frequently it suffers from down time

Functionality

The functionality of a website is largely dependent upon the software used. Unless you have in-house expertise, you will probably need advice from your internet service provider or website designer.

Performance

Your website will need a fast connection to the internet. This is determined by the bandwidth available - the amount of data that can be transmitted and received by an internet connection. If your connection is not fast enough, users will only be able to access your webpages slowly - particularly if many users are trying to access your site at the same time. Most external hosting services refer to this as the 'backbone' - the speed of connection into their servers.

The website will require a web server. Depending on your site requirements you will need to either go for a dedicated server (only your site is hosted on the machine) or a shared hosting service where you share the box with other sites. The shared service can have a detrimental effect on the speed and availability of your website. The specification of the server will also be a factor in the performance of the site. You must also consider processor speed and the disk space needed for the website to operate effectively.

Reliability

Your website should be available 24 hours a day - you will need to maintain and support it. The more you rely on your website, the less you can afford to wait until the following morning until you fix critical problems.

Security is an ongoing concern on the internet, so any solution you opt for should demonstrate that it is secure and able to withstand hackers, fraudsters and denial-of-service attacks.