For those who do not know what web hosting means, it is actually a kind of internet hosting service which allows organizations as well as individuals to make their websites available and accessible to the rest of the world through the World Wide Web. Now the web hosting industry certainly includes a lot of technical jargons which can get extremely confusing for laymen. Given below are some of the common terms relating to advanced web hosting technology and the explanations to the same:
Load balancing – This is a technique in which the providers of web hosting services try to allocate the system load over several available servers. The reason why load balancing is used by web hosting providers is because it is a good way of ensuring that none of the servers are overworked or run the risk of failing. Load balancers are available in a lot of different forms and types and they can be in the form of hardware and software also.
Availability – Availability or uptime can be described as the ability or accessibility of a system to provide some level of redundancy which works in an effort to avoid failure at any point. For example, when there is only a single server which is responding to HTTP requests then it is said that the server is a single point of failure, but when there are two servers which is spread over a load balancing scheme then the load balancer would become the single point of failure. The standard availability is 99.9% because 100% or perfection is both hard and expensive to achieve.
Scalability – This is one of the best qualities that one can have in a web hosting solution because it supports the increasing needs as well as the growth of one’s website. Scalability is a property with the help of which the system can service any load by incorporating extra services or by upgrading its hardware. All these functions are performed in a predetermined manner.
Transaction load and Response time – A server’s performance can be judged on the basis of its response time of a transaction load. When it comes to web hosting, the server’s performance can be judged on the amount of time it takes in order to load the web pages or to process requests. For large and high traffic sites, upgrading of hardware is recommended.
Throughput – This is closely associated with performance. It is defined as the amount of concurrent transactions which can be processed by the server. So this means that a higher throughput means that the system has a high processing power.
