HTTP: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 18. Web Hosting

When you place resources on a public web server, you make them available to the Internet community. These resources can be as simple as text files or images, or as complicated as real-time driving maps or e-commerce shopping gateways. It’s critical that this rich variety of resources, owned by different organizations, can be conveniently published to web sites and placed on web servers that offer good performance at a fair price.

The collective duties of storing, brokering, and administering content resources is called web hosting . Hosting is one of the primary functions of a web server. You need a server to hold, serve, log access to, and administer your content. If you don’t want to manage the required hardware and software yourself, you need a hosting service, or hoster. Hosters rent you serving and web-site administration services and provide various degrees of security, reporting, and ease of use. Hosters typically pool web sites on heavy-duty web servers for cost-efficiency, reliability, and performance.

This chapter explains some of the most important features of web hosting services and how they interact with HTTP applications. In particular, this chapter covers:

• How different web sites can be “virtually hosted” on the same server, and how this affects HTTP

• How to make web sites more reliable under heavy traffic

• How to make web sites load faster