Perl for Web Site Management

Evaluating a Hosting Provider

I’m assuming in this book that you are already experienced with HTML and with the basics of setting up a web site. That means you probably already have a hosting arrangement of some sort: a web server either within your own company or at an outside Internet Service Provider (ISP). To keep things simple, I’m going to assume that you’re hosting with an outside ISP, but in a large company it is quite possible that your “provider” will be an internal company department. This is especially likely if you are developing content for a company intranet, rather than the public Internet. It really doesn’t matter, though. The only question is, can your hosting partner, wherever that partner is located, deliver what you need?

As your web efforts grow more ambitious, you need to think carefully about your hosting arrangements. One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve gone from maintaining a personal home page to maintaining multiple commercial sites is the number of ways in which a site can outgrow its hosting environment. After a fair amount of (sometimes painful) experience, I’ve come up with the following list of attributes that I now look for when evaluating a hosting provider for my own web projects.

The first four items in the following list (Unix environment, shell access, cron capability, and CGI scripting/server-side includes) represent the minimum needed to implement the examples in this book. The remaining items may be more or less important depending ...