Is Your Website Hosted at Uptown or Downtown?

Web hosting is probably the important aspect of doing business on Internet. The average website you see are provided by ISPs. These business web sites are paying for the space rendered for the site to be connected to the Internet. Web hosting used to cost around hundreds of dollars, but of the recent years, we have seen a drastic decrease in the pricing. There are many reasons behind the drastic drop. The very noticeable reason is actually competition. Although the demand has increased significantly, the provider has been also keeping up with the demand in riding on server space service market.

Everybody knows that web hosting is by leasing a domain space for business or web publishing needs. But what people do not generally know is that hosting is originated from servers, which are physically placed in offices. Both dedicated IP and shared IP are all hosted within physical servers. Most of the starting up company websites chooses to use shared IP web hosting services for their business needs because it is cheaper that way. However, the implication by other sites, which are also sharing the IP addresses, could be fly-by-night companies that indulged in scamming activities or incidentally involved in spamming activities. Although, your site has absolutely nothing to do with it, your site will be more or less implicated by not being able to be generated in search engine’s search results and also not being able to communicate via email as your IP address had been blacklisted. That is why more and more companies are switching to dedicated IP web hosting for running their business operation aside.

After understanding the importance of using proper dedicated IP addresses, we also found that prices still varies among the domain web hosting providers. What is the cost of the variation of the pricing? Well, in bid to cut cost, web-hosting companies usually run their server in downtown location. The reason why the cost were significantly cheaper is that generally speaking, downtown office has a very cheap rental rate. As commercial properties are extremely expensive in the city or uptown area, the cost for the server has to ultimately be factored into the price tag offer to customers in order to make a profit.

As you may probably realised, every advantages comes with a disadvantages and vice-versa. If you are using a city or uptown server location web hosting facilities, you tend to be able to enjoy the efficiency offered by such web-hosting avenue because the infrastructure is generally better, more assurance in server uptime as well as faster connection. Although, server is able to route information through LAN cable or coaxial cable, connection speed is inevitably compromised if your hosting facility is located at countryside, downtown area. We all understand that the longer the cable, the more “load” that will act as resistance thus slowing down the speed. However, if the infrastructure of the network backbone and design is aptly done using optic fibre connection, it is possible to increase the speed to a large extend. But, downtown locations, which are usually situated at countryside, do not possess the best of infrastructure. In some worse case scenario, they may be using obsolete lease connection or even requires dial up.

In the aspect of server maintenance and contingencies, it is deemed to be more challenging to put a server situated in the office space in downtown area than going to city or uptown area. Well maintenance is done in a stipulated manner, so it should not affect the performance much. But what if the server runs into error or system hang, you need someone to actually go down to the physical server in that server room to reset it. This process could take days as it can be at a very far location. Although remote monitoring of the system health as well as straight forward remote control is generally possible, but in some incidents like crash, remote control system is unable to do a single thing about it as it may lose the control sequence altogether.

After going through at length on the pros and cons of downtown locations and uptown locations hosting, we understand that although, domain web hosting server situated at downtown is relatively much cheaper, it does carries a large extend of inconvenience which will in a sense hurt the business of the entire entity. Leaving the server to be down for too long of a time, will turn into a situation where your clients will lose trust in your business. It is a tricky situation, but the bottom line in business is adequate resource to support business operation effectively. Whilst on the other hand, business practices are encouraged to cut their operation cost to be competitive. It is a balance between cost and effectiveness that the business owner has to decide. Therefore, the business must take business objectives into consideration. In the instance of hosting an online game, you definitely have to deploy the most effective system to do the job, as server uptime is of a extreme concern to your customers.