internet

. Web Server Hardware & Performance Evaluation The two main ingredients in web server are its hardware (computer) and its web server software. You must first determine which web server s/w you want to run on the server. Then you should decide the h/w to install – s/w requirements limit computer hardware choices. making host or not host decisions A key question for the companies that provide e-commerce or that want to serve web pages is whether to host their own website .The first step in planning a web server is to find out what the management & sales staff wants to accomplish with this server. The company must also decide will the server have to run transactions, then to what degree staffs are involved with server etc. The company may decide a third party web and e-commerce provider. When making a web server hosting decision, you should ask whether the h/w platform & s/w combination can be quickly & easily scaled up when website traffic grows. The company’s web server requirements are directly related to its e- com transaction volume & website traffic. The most successful e-com solutions are scalable, that is they can be adapted to meet changing requirements. It is costly to be stuck with a web server that cannot be enhanced. Using a third party or ISP is an ideal solution because the e-com novices need not provide h/w & s/w to launch a website. Also third party services reduces staffing requirements. If ISP is used, the small companies do not need to establish direct internet connection. Smaller companies can take the advantage of 3rd party ecom s/w, which provides all the fundamental promotional features needed to sell products online. Deciding whether to host a website has an impact on availability and bandwidth. A site that can handle many visitors simultaneously is said to have high bandwidth while sites that have difficulty in accommodating large numbers of visitors have low bandwidth . If the number of visitors were small, slow internet connection & low bandwidth may be sufficient. But a popular website with millions of visitors should have high speed and high bandwidth. A company need not choose a nationwide ISP. Local ISPs are sufficient, but we should know how these local ISPs interact with nationwide ISPs. ISPs provide T1 level service and we should know how many T1 lines are there. Some ISPs will put multiple customers on a single T1 line, which reduces the bandwidth. So ISP’s ratio of customers to T 1 lines should be decided. Lower the ratio it is more desirable , which increases bandwidth . Web platform choices When making h/w choices, companies must be forward thinking . A fast server is always better than a slower one. But you should decide which server is good when your business is small, & which one is good when your business grows. Another important factor is internal & external traffic. For small organizations we can expect 1000 hits every hour. But for large organizations we should expect ten thousand hits every hour. Also some clients will be using very high speed connection and some others very low speed dial up connection. So you should take planning and testing decisions. Hardware design leads to O.S and application server software choices. All three are tied together to determine the performance of system. One of the most important variables in the server decision is whether the server hardware is scalable, that means we can upgrade the server and connect additional servers.