Expectations of Hosting Provider from his web-server

Ideas come out in mind, and they are always being in progress, which lead to various proposals and where hosting provider being kicked around. Hosting providers always think about the services which their web server should offer to their customers.

Web developers are smart brains; they are the people who come up with lot more ideas, so they need lot of features. According to us there are few features, which are essential for the Hosting provider to look into:

• Run fast, so it can cope with a lot of inquiries using a minimum of hardware.

• Be multitasking, so it can deal with more than one inquiry at once.

• Be multitasking, so that the person running it can maintain the data it hands out without having to shut the service down. Multitasking is hard to arrange within a program: the only way to do it properly is to run the server on a multitasking operating system.

• Authenticate inquirers: some may be entitled to more services than others.

• Respond to errors in the messages it gets with answers that make sense in the context of what is going on. For instance, if a client requests a page that the server cannot find, the server should respond with a “404” error, which is defined by the HTTP specification to mean “page does not exist.”

• Negotiate a style and language of response with the inquirer. For instance, it should—if the people running the server can rise to the challenge—be able to respond in the language of the inquirer’s choice. This ability, of course, can open up your site to a lot more action. And there are parts of the world where a response in the wrong language can be a bad thing. If you were operating in Canada, where the English/French divide arouses bitter feelings, or in Belgium, where the French/Flemish split is as bad, this feature could make or break your business.

• Offer different formats. On a more technical level, a user might want JPEG image files rather than GIF, or TIFF rather than either of the former. He or she might want text in vdi format rather than PostScript.

• Run as a proxy server. A proxy server accepts requests for clients, forwards them to the real servers, and then sends the real servers’ responses back to the clients. There are two reasons why you might want a proxy server:

— The proxy might be running on the far side of a firewall, giving its users access to the Internet.
— The proxy might cache popular pages to save re-accessing them.

• Be secure. The Internet world is like the real world, peopled by a lot of lambs and a few wolves. The wolves like to get into the lambs’ folds and, when there, raven and tear in the usual wolfish way. The aim of a good server is to prevent this happening. The subject of security is so important that we will come back to it several times before we are through.