Summary: Some interesting factoids and Truisms about web hosting. A great adjunct to your perspective  on website hosting.

Truism #1

99.999% availability (‘fine nines’ service level) means a downtime of about 5 minutes per year, but 99.99% (‘four nines’) is 53 minutes a year (these times excludes planned maintenance).

The difference in cost for the additional up time can be significant, and remember that broken access to a website can be external to the hosting service. Therefore, any downtime may not always be the fault of the service provider. So, figure out the cost versus potential lost profit of paying a hosting service for the higher service levels before committing.

Truism #2

Wordpress V3.1 has over 3 million downloads and Wordpress runs 15% of the web’s high traffic sites (source: mediabeat). A good web hosting service definition will offer an automated installation service using a script library such as Fantastico. Besides Wordpress, this will make it easy for you to install databases, bulletin boards, wikis, shopping cart software and much of the other open source software which is powering the web.

Truism #3

Check Your Numbers! Massive Web hosting companies offer a variety of statistics packages to help you mine the traffic data they store for you. You can get it as straight numbers or full color charts and turn it into information to help you improve your site’s performance. For example, higher bounce rates, say, with a particular browser could point to a quality issue with your site’s implementation. There’s a wealth of information available to help you tune your site.

Truism  #4

Did you know that ‘PHP:Hypertext Preprocessor’ is what is known as a recursive acronym? Yes, just a clever definition talking about itself; however, PHP itself is defined in general as a server-side scripting language, originally developed in 1995. The current stable version is PHP V5.4.0, and it enables a website to handle dynamic web pages such as a blog posts or photo libraries. Similar to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (‘ASP’), it is Open Source and it has been estimated that 75% of webservers run PHP. Most, though not all hosting companies run version 5 so they achieve fast hosting.

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