Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can serve your website content from localised servers to your website visitors. What that means in business terms is your clients should recieve your content faster!
CDNs also allow you to protect yourself from attack (Denial Of Service) by distributing your traffic across many servers. Many providers, such as cloudflare also offer a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to better protect you from threats.
Consider a CDN for your website and defend against attacks, proactively.
The BBC has reported that the web giant Google has tasked it’s DeepMind division, which works with computer artificial intelligence, to decrease energy consumption in their data centres.
Data centres consume huge amounts of power and need to be cooled in order to run at peak efficiency and promote longevity of hardware within them. A reduction in consumption of power for the cooling systems in these centres would be a valuable system to have in any such facility and DeepMind is planning on releasing the software to other centres as soon as they can!
Get in touch with me to discuss website hosting solutions
In simple terms website hosting is a term used to describe where your website is saved. Your website is a collection of files stored on a hard disk drive, or a solid state drive in some cases, this drive may contain multiple websites all of which are accessed using the the internet.
The hard drive will be in a computer somewhere, this type of computer is called a server. Servers are usually manufactured to be thinner than regular desktop computer towers, this is so that they can be mounted in a rack which allows a lot of servers to be kept in one place. The server will be stored in a remote location and probably connected to the internet with a fast internet connection so that the site can be quickly accessed by your visitors.
Websites are uploaded to servers using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or a web interface such as a content management system. Some people will choose to host their website themselves; however this can cause problems if a lot of people access the site, the website allows visitors to stream video footage, or if the website contains large files.
Other factors can effect the speed of your website loading time, for example a large number of visitors accessing the website at the same time. This can occur when a hacker or group of hackers decides to attack your website and deny others access to it, this is called a DDOS (Deliberate Denial Of Service).
There are different types of website hosting packages that are available. Most small businesses or personal sites will be hosted on a shared server with other similarly demanding websites.
Medium to large organisations may chose to have a dedicated server, which is a hosting package that allows them to have their only their content stored on the server. The main reason for doing this is so that they can have a larger community access their site or sites without disrupting other websites hosted on the server.
The final type of hosting I’m going to briefly outline is reseller hosting, this is the name given to a hosting package that allows a company to distribute hosting packages to whomever they wish.
I can offer website hosting packages to you or your business, if you are interested please contact me