Compare options for outsourcing your NT Web site
Given a copy of Windows NT and an Internet connection, anyone can create a Web site. But in today's fast-paced markets, building and maintaining a Web site usually means outsourcing: Your company pays someone else to host your site. Shared-hosting services put many different Web sites on the same servers, so the sites share resources and costs. By outsourcing your Web hosting to a service, you outsource most of your administrative and maintenance costs.
Web hosting services do regular backups, often hourly. The companies have 24 X 7 staffs that keep their servers running to guarantee uptime. In addition, hosting services handle bureaucratic administrative details such as registering your domains and obtaining digital certificates. Some services also offer e-commerce systems that provide secure online markets for your customers. Third-party services host some of the largest Web sites on the Internet, such as Yahoo!, Lycos, and SportsLine.
The Web hosting market has been growing rapidly, and NT-based site hosting has been growing even faster. NT hosting accounts are usually more expensive than UNIX accounts because Linux, BSDI, and Apache are free and NT is not. However, the cost difference between an NT and UNIX account isn't huge, and you can easily justify the expense if NT is your Web applications' native environment. Forrester Research predicts that NT's share of the shared-hosting market will grow from 6 percent in 1998 to 20 percent in 2003. The dedicated-hosting market is even more NT-focused: Forrester Research predicts the NT dedicated-hosting market share will grow from 29 percent in 1998 to 45 percent in 2003.
The increase in the number of Web-hosting services has created a market for third-party products for NT ISPs. For example, 123 Go Global, CrystalTech, Interland, and Media3 all use Ipswitch's IMail. Some ISPs also recommend products to their customers, such as which external authentication manager to purchase. I suspect that some of the services I tested based their administrative control panels on third-party products, but the services never gave me a clear answer. Microsoft ships a barely adequate product for administering Internet Information Server (IIS), and this inadequacy creates a value-added opportunity for Web-hosting services.
My research confirms Forrester Research's results: I found that many Web-hosting services, including many of the largest services, offer NT hosting. However, many services offer NT hosting on only dedicated servers because of the security concerns that hosting an NT-based site presents, especially in a shared environment. When a site supports powerful applications (e.g., Allaire's ColdFusion) in a shared environment, the hosting service must lock down privileged resources, such as Registry access. (For more information about Web-hosting security concerns, see the sidebar "Security in a Hosted Environment," page 138.)
However, some Web-hosting services use security concerns as an excuse for their lack of useful administrative features. For example, some inferior services offer Telnet access and command-line utilities to manually change your files' and directories' ACLs. Some services offer the standard IISADMIN page that comes with IIS. Quality Web-hosting services provide a secured Web page in which you can manage users, ODBC connections, and directory access.
I discovered that, pricing details aside, the administrative features a service provides differentiate it from the competition. If your site supports a nontrivial Web application that talks to a database or requires secure pages that users need a password to access, comparing administrative features is worthwhile.
I reviewed eight NT shared-hosting services. To select these services, I looked for services that support sophisticated NT applications and provide the flexibility for your site to grow. All the services I reviewed support upgrading your site to a dedicated server, provide 24 * 7 support staff, and let you use Active Server Pages (ASP), Perl, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs, ColdFusion, and Microsoft SQL Server. Many services I tested bragged about their 99 percent or greater uptime, but a little math reveals that these numbers don't merit bragging rights: 99.5 percent of a 24-hour day is 1432.8 minutes, which means that these services average 7 minutes and 12 seconds of downtime every day.
To test the Web-hosting services, I wrote an application that maintains the member list and a contractor database for a neighborhood association. Users can add new contractors, create contractor references, and edit contractor records, including the types of work a contractor does. The application uses five tables in one database, and I tested it with both Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access. In addition, I wrote identical versions of the application in ASP and Perl and tested each version on all the services. For more information about the test application, see the sidebar "The Test Application and Posting Process," page 140.
My testing and research proved that some services are clearly better than others. Although price and quality of administrative features affected my assessment of a service's overall value, testing revealed that the accessibility of a service's features is also an important factor. Overall, Interland earned the Editor's Choice award because it provided the best service at a competitive price.
Some people argue that conventional application software is dead and Internet-distributed programs are the future. If this prediction holds true, Web-hosting services will definitely play a central role.
123 Go Global
123 Go Global is a group of hosting companies that includes 1st Choice International and 1st Host International. Unlike most hosting services I reviewed, this company focuses more on NT hosting than UNIX hosting.
123 Go Global offers six NT hosting plans: NT-0 through NT-5. NT-0 and NT-1 are minimal plans that don't offer many NT features. The best values start at NT-3, which costs $25 per month and includes ASP and ColdFusion support, 50MB of disk space, and 4GB of bandwidth per month. You can also order Microsoft Index Server support, VPN connections, and hourly system backups for all 123 Go Global's plans. The company provides unlimited Microsoft FrontPage subweb support, and it generates excellent WebTrends traffic reports for your site. In addition, 123 Go Global gives you raw log access. To create an e-commerce site, Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition is available for $200 per store. 123 Go Global also provides a 24 X 7 toll-free technical support number. I ran into some problems with 123 Go Global's hosting services, and its technical support staff responded well.
123 Go Global lets you create a pretty good Web site for a reasonable price, and its Web-based email is especially appealing. (123 Go Global is one of four services that use IMail, which lets your users send email from a Web page, as Screen 1 shows.) However, its lack of an online control panel made development more cumbersome than development using the other services I reviewed. I had to contact customer service to get Data Service Names (DSNs) and usernames and to set privileges on specific files and directories. 123 Go Global supports ASPLogin, which you can use to create a user database. Many applications manage users and access rights using their own software logic based on their user directory. If your applications work this way, 123 Go Global will work for you. However, if you want to manage users and access
rights outside your application, consider a company that provides a good administrative page.
I was surprised to discover that 123 Go Global requires file DSNs for database access—it was the only company I reviewed that had this requirement. File DSNs, which contain database-connection information in a file, are plain-text files, so ODBC won't store a database password in them. In addition, you can have only one file DSN in a domain.
123 Go Global's other drawbacks include the lack of both a redundant backbone connection and streaming audio and video. Also, it was one of only three vendors that don't support SQL Server 7.0. Despite these shortcomings, 123 Go Global isn't the worst value of the hosting services I reviewed.
CrystalTech
CrystalTech offers six pricing plans, Plan I through Plan VI. Plan I provides 1GB of transfer, 20 POP accounts, and almost all CrystalTech's standard features (e.g., 24 * 7 technical support, Perl support, WebTrends reports, and Access and ODBC support) for $19.95 per month, but this plan doesn't support SQL Server, Index Server, or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Plan II doubles transfer allowance and disk space, and gives you 30 POP accounts and SSL for $39.95 per month. However, to gain SQL Server and Index Server support, you have to spend at least $79.95 per month for Plan III. In addition to Plan III's features, Plan IV offers 6GB of transfer, 400MB of disk space, and 40 POP accounts for $109.95 per month. Plan V, which costs $189.95 per month, and Plan VI, which costs $259.95 per month, are too expensive, and prospective customers should consider spending another $100 for a dedicated hosting service (so that you're not paying to compete with other sites for system resources).
One of CrystalTech's main features is its configuration Web page. (The company promises to upgrade this page soon.) The existing configuration page starts with an excellent FAQ that was helpful during development. Next, the configuration page includes a daily updated WebTrends site statistics report, as Screen 2 shows, that is similar to the reports 123 Go Global, Interland, and Media3 provide. The configuration page also offers an unimpressive list of links to Web resources, mostly various Microsoft pages. Most of the other vendors I reviewed provide a better resource list.
The configuration page also contains a link to CrystalTech's network status page. This page is unique among the vendors I reviewed because it lists any server downtime in recent months, details about each downtime, including which servers went down and why, and uptime percentage reports for all its servers. However, CrystalTech reports uptimes by server number (i.e., 1 through 20) instead of server name, so I couldn't figure out which server my test site was on. The uptime reports showed that 3 of the 20 servers had uptimes of 99.3 percent, 99.4 percent, and 99.4 percent—all uptimes that fall short of CrystalTech's promised 99.5 percent uptime. However, I don't know how these numbers compare with other vendors, because only CrystalTech reports this data about its own server downtime.
The last item on the configuration page is a link to IISADMIN, the standard Microsoft Internet Service Manager (ISM—CrystalTech plans to replace this link with a control panel). You can use IISADMIN to set directories as executable or scriptable, turn indexing on and off, and set default documents. In addition, IISADMIN's security page restricts user access to a directory by specifying authentication based on a particular domain. However, IISADMIN can't manage users in a domain, so unless your Web hosting service provides an alternative way to manage users, IISADMIN's security feature is useless.
CrystalTech also offers IMail to administer your email system. The administration page is plain but effective and lets you create and manage accounts, mailboxes for accounts, and aliases. Clients can use IMail to read their mail both on the Web and using a conventional POP3 client.