Web Hosting and Web Development

Whether you are looking to set up a small ecommerce store or a full-blown multi-million dollar web operation capable of serving thousands of simultaneous users, the technical decisions made upfront regarding your web hosting platform can at a minimum reduce headaches down the road and in many cases save significant amounts of money due to reduced downtime. Of equal importance is choosing a development language and platform that is well suited to the primary functions of your website. When these two components are working in harmony the net result is a performant ecosystem that delivers the best possible experience to your valuable users.

 

Shopping for Web Hosting

For small and large businesses alike, the best platform for almost certainly be Linux based and also include an Apache server, mySQL database and PHP. Such an open source configuration is commonly refered to as LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP) and is available for both shared and dedicated hosting. With either shared or dedicated hosting, this secure and stable configuration can be scaled as needed if traffic increases beyond what the system was initially designed for.

 

A Microsoft web hosting platform is another option, but is likely not the best option unless a Microsoft Windows hosting need exists to support Microsoft specific technology like the .NET framework.

 

Choosing a Web Development Platform

Perhaps even more important than choosing the most appropriate web hosting option is selecting the most appropriate web development language and platform. Certainly each language/platform has its set of strengths and weaknesses so balancing these qualities in order to select the best long-term development option is critical. Redeveloping an established website once it is deployed is task that you would only wish upon your competition. Here we evaluate three of the most popular options: PHP, CodeFusion and ASP.