Shared hosting is, perhaps, one of the most widespread services of the hosting providers. Beginners in the web hosting industry propose virtual hosting very often. One of the popular methods to implement it is a hosting community.
A hosting community is a powerful server, switched to a thick channel. From tens to some hundreds of WWW projects and sites live in this space. As a rule, each project uses one WWW server, one FTP server, one SQL server, one mail server and other auxiliary services.
The hosting community allows the adjustment of these services to support many users, registered on the server at once.
At the early stage of the Internet development, the backup hosting solution was not so easy to implement. The server administrators had to use a separate IP address for each WWW project. It was the only solution to start services just for a specific user.
The solution of the hosting community is the storing of all projects at one computer. Each project is stored in its own catalogue. The disk quote restricts the disk volume, provided for each project. The quotes' volume depends on the tariff plan, selected by the clients. The server is managed by the system administrator or system administrators' team, hired by the hosting provider. The main tasks of the system administrator of the virtual hosting are:
-external security providing;
-internal security providing;
-supplied resources control for preventing server overloading.
Providing the external security is not a specific feature of the hosting. It is the counteraction to the network attacks. The system administrators solve this task in traditional ways: time software updates, proper firewall adjustment, connection pools shadowing, etc.
Providing the internal security is a much more complex task. It includes the prevention of many technical or security issues. In the case of virtual hosting, each system user can try himself as a hacker to get access to the folders of other users. The ability to read any documents, placed in the folders of other users, must be prohibited. The tasks of the internal security include the Backup hosting solution. The data protection of the accidental damaging is one of the most important requirements for the shared hosting providers.
Server loading control is also very important task of the hosting provider. The hosting is more profitable for a provider when the server contains many Internet projects; however, the time of response for each project is increased when the server loading is growing up. When the number of clients is growing, the up hosting provider may need to upgrade the hardware, install an additional server or widen the channel.
You can evaluate the server overloading of any provider in a very simple way. Only visit the projects, displaced at this server, and evaluate the speed of the pages loading and scripts response time (try chats, forums, guest books and so on). The preferred way for choosing hosting is obtaining a free access for some term to test the quality of the service. Thus, you will be able to test your project's behavior in the real conditions.