Website files must be made available to users in as straightforward a way as possible, and on demand. If you wanted to do this for yourself, you would need a powerful computer to cope with the number of users accessing the content - if it takes more than about seven seconds to download your homepage, they are unlikely to stick around and wait. You would also need a permanent connection to the Internet, so that the files are available 24 hours a day, along with server software to give out the data on request, and to handle many users accessing the same data all at once. You also have the security of the rest of your system to think about - by making some of your files available, you are indicating where the private ones are also likely to be stored...

Don't panic!

A simple and cost effective alternative is to find someone else to provide the storage, connectivity and services necessary to serve your website files. Make a list of the features you know you will need from your website, such as the amount of disk space, multimedia, etc. and start from there. Many of my customers tell me that they consider the most important point to be flexibility. Their websites and businesses may evolve in a variety of directions - depending on the performance of their products and services, emerging techology, technical skill of inhouse personnel and many other factors - and this is why they like to have the ability to be able to make certain changes to their existing hosting arrangements without any hassle.

There are two sorts of hosting arrangement: dedicated hosting and shared hosting. The difference is simply whether you share the server with other customers, or have one all to yourself. If the server running your website is very busy all the time, whether it's because you receive a lot of visitors and/or because you have a lot of complex programs running, a dedicated server would probably be best for you. If you are unsure what you need, shared hosting is the easiest to start with.

Some of my customers' websites receive a lot of visitors (and I mean a lot), and so we installed load-balanced server farms at their office locations around the country (and in three cases, around the world). Imagine each user is a shopper at your local supermarket. Instead of joining a long queue to pay for your goods, you would look to see if there are any cashiers free and move to a different till if it would be quicker for you to do so. This is exactly what load-balancing devices do: they balance the incoming users across a number of powerful computers serving the same website, thus minimising the users' file download times. Clever, eh?