One of the questions I get asked day in and day out, usually with a very confused stare is, “What is Grid Hosting?” It’s a question that is somewhat difficult to answer especially when asked by someone that isn’t technical in nature.
First you need to understand how typical shared web hosting works. When you go to a standard web hosting company, and you agree to pay say $9.95 a month to have your site hosted, your site is placed onto a single web server (physical computer) along with hundreds or even thousands of other sites.
Web hosting companies like ours maintain statistics on sites, and are able to fairly accurately estimate how many sites a server can handle. This is because there is a fairly steady ratio of big sites to small sites.
This works well for the web hosting companies because they are able to maximize floor space in their data centers and increase profits per server.
It doesn’t work so well for the website owners for a few reasons. First, your site is now on a server with 1000 other sites, balanced in a way that the server is basically maxed out of it’s resources. If your site takes off, and throws the balance on that server off, or another site on that server takes off, all the sudden the entire server is running slow for everyone. If your site really takes off, it can bring the entire server down, along with the other 999 sites on that server.
Web hosting providers have automatic safe guards in place to prevent this. In their contracts they state that your site may only use the AVERAGE amount of resources, determined by all sites on the server. So if all the sudden you go from 100 users a day, to 100,000, there systems will automatically shut your website down and display a message to all visitors saying your site has exceeded its resource allotment.
Take for example Namaste Solar in Boulder, CO. During Obama’s stimulus package tour of the country he stopped in Denver, CO. During his speech he talked about Namaste and how they would be adding additional staff due to money they were expecting to make from the stimulus package alternative energy credits. This was covered on Fox News, and within minutes their site was taken offline by GoDaddy, Inc. for resource over usage. Just at the time when Namaste was having their 15 minutes of fame, and needed to be ready for the traffic and potential orders.
GoDaddy had no choice, they had to take Namaste down or bring down hundreds or thousands of other customers sites.
At the same time, it’s not easy for Namaste or GoDaddy to move their site to a less populated server, because any kind of site upgrade like that requires that Namaste reinstall their site on an entirely new server, reroute their DNS records to the new server, and more.
The other negative aspect of single server hosting is that if a server suffers a hardware failure, every site on that server is down until the hosting provider can restore the latest backup to a new server, or replace the failed hardware in the existing server. Usually this can take hours.
Grid hosting solves these problems. In a grid hosting environment, your site isn’t stored on a single server, it’s stored on multiple servers simultaniously, and each of those servers is responding to requests for your site.
When an web user requests your site from the server, a routing server determines which of the servers running your site is the least busy, and automatically routes that web user to that server.
This has many advantages for the web hosting provider and the web hosting customer.
First is stability. Because your site is hosted on multiple servers, it’s much more difficult for any single site or even group of sites to effect performance for other websites on the server, since traffic is balanced and delivered to the least busy server. It’s also very difficult in a well designed environment for a single hardware failure to bring a site offline. If a single server or even multiple servers fail, the traffic is usually rerouted within seconds to the other servers.
Second is expandability. As I mentioned with standard hosting, it’s very difficult to upgrade your site’s resources and usually requires you to move your site to a new server which can be difficult and time consuming. With grid hosting, upgrading resources is simply a matter of clicking a few buttons and telling the servers to assign you more resources. If a grid starts to run low on resources, adding a new server to the grid can usually be done in only minutes.
The real benefit comes in what your customers see, and what happens when your site really takes off, be it from getting on the news, to someone posting you on Digg or StumbleUpon, or just from your good hard marketing efforts.
With grid hosting, your site always responds quickly, and can easily handle any kind of traffic you need it to. This costs you a little more, but it improves your customer image and reliability greatly. It’s also very beneficial if you are using your website for mission critical Software as a Service type applications.
In summary, if you need your site to always be available and/or you expect your site to grow beyond a hundred visitors a day, grid hosting is probably well worth the extra few dollars a month that it will cost you for the reliability and upgradability.
Andrew Taylor
Chief Technical Officer
Satori Tech Solutions, Inc.
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