Web Site Hosting
When you have or are getting a site designed you have to keep it on a PC that is always on and permanently connected to the internet - so someone looking for your site or the products and service you sell (if your website design is done well) they can see the pages - if the pages don't come up they'll just get a blank screen error telling them you don't exist. While this is not good with a shop on the High Street - which likely runs from 8:00am to 5:00pm Monday to Friday - in the WWW 24/7 is strictly the norm and what is expected. An empty page just says you've gone out of business or stopped trading. It is possible to keep your site on a PC at home - but you'll need a static IP address (basically a web telephone number) so the big servers know where to find you and you'll have to tell them the number and www.youraddress.co.uk so they know where to send people looking for you. So long as you have no power cuts, telephone line problems and your PC stays alive this should all run fine. Most however prefer to rent space from a dedicated 'server farm'
Web Site Hosting by Merrehill Ltd
As you may expect there are many advantages to letting a large dedicated company do the job. With the economy of scale they can buy two or three thousand rack mount PC's (the ones that slot into a big fridge and all share one monitor), power them through a battery, keep the room filtered free of dust and air conditioned and have generators should the power fail. With a set up that big they can have staff that do nothing else but monitor the farm and keep things running smoothly. Most web sites - even large ones - take up a tiny amount of disc space and any decent Web Site Hosting server can handle the traffic (people from the internet viewing the pages or inter-acting with your site) of several hundred websites. Hence it makes a lot of sense to host you site on one of these farms.
The site should be monitored - so that is the volume of traffic on it is reaching a point where it may struggle to keep up, it can be moved to a server which has the room or a more powerful processor & bandwidth capable of handling the site and the traffic. These professional set ups would almost always have the software to monitor the traffic so you or your provider can stay in control of what is happening.
Need we say that Web Site Hosting by Merrehill Ltd is done using two server farms on our own dedicated PC's. If you need reliable Web Site Hosting - give us a call.
