What You Should Know About Web Site Servers. All Web Hosting servers go down from time to time. Even high-performance Web servers connected to the Internet through some cool sounding, high-speed hookups, go down. The two things you should be concerned about are -- how often and for how long. What does an intermittent Web server do to you? Besides @#$**&!!! -- It gives you: A false sense of security, if you didn't know your Web server is intermittent. A strong dose of anxiety whenever you're in front of a client or prospect and your fabulous site happens to be down. Lost opportunity when visitors stumble into your site through some search engine but can't see what you have to offer (giving them no reason to bookmark your page since they don't know what's on it). And more lost opportunity when a piece of advertising you paid for directs prospects to your Web site - that's down! What does this have to do with your Web site? The more Domains on a Web server, the more likely it will experience intermittent down-times. That's just the way it is. Other than the obvious higher demand to serve up Web pages, random intermittent down-time is also related to the demand put on the CPU (Central Processing Unit) by the myriad of Java, CGI, ASP and FrontPage functions requesting CPU time. Some common functions include form processing, page counters, and shopping carts. And there's a whole slew of other operations that really task a Web server's CPU. They are the ones that produce the complex, dynamic-content Web Sites that are becoming more and more common. The point is.... When you have 250 or more Web sites telling the CPU to do this and that, and that and this, and more and more of it, it sometimes gets confused and stumbles around trying to recover (i.e. disk chatter, sluggish performance, etc.), or it simply fails. Have you ever got one of those "You have performed an illegal operation." error messages and you didn't do anything out of the ordinary? You might have had 3 or 4 applications open at once and tried to print something, or send email. Who knows? Maybe you left your computer on too long. For whatever reason, your computer just locked up! Now compare your relatively few tasks to the massive number of tasks a Web server is asked to perform by the wide variety of Web sites/pages it serves. Add that to the fact that Web servers are left on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (24/7)-- and you have the perfect recipe for a time bomb. You don't know when it's going to go off. It just will. There are some things experienced server administrators can do to minimize the number of catastrophic failures. But on mass market, high volume servers, it's impossible to cover all the bases. The best thing a server administrator can do in those situations is to have a good recovery procedure. And that brings up another bottleneck area for high volume Web servers. A good catastrophic failure, recovery plan also includes daily or weekly backups. You're going to want to consider this because backing up some servers can slow them down to a crawl. The time it takes to perform the backup is directly related to the number of Web sites/pages that reside and change on the server. This means you should expect longer slow periods on Web servers with large numbers of domains because there's more things to backup. I know you might be thinking, "but I don't use any of those hi-tech functions and features on my Web site". Unfortunately it doesn't matter. What matters is what all the other Web sites are doing on the same Web server as yours. There is no easy way to pick a fast, reliable server. What's great today might be a bad deal tomorrow. I've seen the performance of Web servers go from pretty good to pretty bad overnight. It normally happens without warning, right after a change or software upgrade that you know nothing about. And sometimes it comes after a successful marketing campaign for new clients by your Web Hosting company. But there is one common sense rule you can follow to increase your chances of picking a Web server with speed and reliability. The rule is: The lower the price the higher the volume, and the higher the volume the slower the server -- and the higher the likelihood of failure. You'll probably also experience a lack of personal service due to the shear volume of support that must be rendered. It's still true -- you get what you pay for. So unless you have a fairly good understanding of what Web servers, Email servers and DNS servers can do for you, you'll want to avoid the cheapest deal in town. You should go with a Web Hosting company that not just advertises support, but one that will actually take the time to fill you in on the many options that are available to you depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Both in the short-term and long-term. Please keep in mind, higher cost doesn't always mean better performance or reliability.