What Is a Host?

For the completely uninitiated, a "web host"' or host is a company that houses your website on its servers. They typically provide DNS, email, tech support, registration of your domain name, firewalls and security, and much more.

Choosing a Host

If you've spent any time at all searching for a host, you will no doubt have found about eight-bazillion different hosts, each claiming to be the best hosting site on the Web. While this book will not be recommending one, we will cover ways to evaluate and learn more about them; what the different terms mean, and some important differences between hosts such as "shared" versus "dedicated". These are all critical to know if you want to have a successful launch of your Joomla! site. Typically, the hosts are housed in a physically secure facility, and provide emergency power in the form of a generator or other means of battery backed-up power. Often, they have more than one connection to the Internet. Most of them can provide you with as much bandwidth and speed as you need, allowing you to buy what you need. These facilities should provide a great deal of protection for your website. They should be enabled with fire-suppression and protection, water-detection, security personnel, caged and locked access to servers, and more. One data center the author is familiar with personally, has a fully-redundant network, meaning, if a backhoe were to cut through their data lines leading to the Internet, the hosts would be able to continue their operations through another path. This is important to understand because if they are down, you are down. Another mark of a good host is 24-7 network monitoring with live personnel.

For instance, if you call them at 2:00 am local time (local to you), they should pick up the phone and be able to address your questions. If they cannot offer you this support, then find another host. One question you may wish to ask when evaluating a host is to ask about their "emergency power". Chances are they will say "we have a generator". Ask them- How long will it run without refueling? This is expressed in hours, such as seventy-two hours or forty-eight hours, and so on. The next question is to ask them if they have fuel-contracts and what is the delivery time? What you are asking them is—Can you get these noisy beasts refueled before they run out of fuel? The person you are speaking with may or may not know it, but ask them to find out. This is an industry norm.

You will need to determine right away the type of hosting you need, shared or dedicated. The questions to help you determine which one you need are beyond the scope of this book, but we will discuss the differences between the two.

Questions to Ask a Prospective Host

You may be a two-person shop in your field, but that makes you a leader. As a leader, you cannot sit still; you must be planning for the future. You must be on the lookout for threats to your business, and the opportunities to grow. Your host has to be flexible to accommodate your needs in this area. Face it, if you select a host simply due to them being the lowest cost provider, you are being "penny wise and pound foolish", which is to say that you are saving a penny through your efforts that is costing you a dollar! Remember, selecting a provider on cost alone is a terrible mistake; one that will cost you dearly. Take some time and review your competition in your field. Where are they hosted? Why are they hosted there? What are the costs and the associated setup fees to set up there and so on. I am not advocating that you follow them into the abyss of hosting. However, they may know something you do not. Hosting is not your business, unless you are a hosting company. Your business is whatever it is, yet, hosting is an integral part of your business web strategy and should be considered as such. It's not an after-thought, anymore than, 'gee' I don't care if I live in a terrible, crime ridden neighborhood while I don't have to; its 'cheap'. Take the time to review what your web strategy is. Evaluate your strategy in terms of your questions.

Facilities

What physical security measures do the hosts have in place? I have visited countless data centers in my career; yet, the ones that stand out in my memory are those that had a very strong security. This is not to mean that they have a card swipe on the server room door. No, this is a strong perimeter set at the front door, a strong authentication at the check-in desk that you are supposed to be there. Once there, can you open the rack or cage of anyone's servers? If you can, this is a bad sign.

Having a strong security presence on the floor always gives me a sense of security about the data center. Of course, there are cameras but so what! A guard who's wearing a weapon, and walking on the floor will do a lot to deter a social engineer who might have made it to the floor.

Things to Ask Your Host about Facility Security

As you are researching or interviewing the prospective host, one thing that is usually not asked by the average consumer is the security of the facility. It's important because this will often tell you if the host is simply reselling, or if it runs the facility. If they do not know, or brush it off, they are probably only 'reselling' someone else's hosting. That does not mean it's bad; it means they do not know.

If that is not the case, then the person you email or speak with by telephone should be able to address your questions. These are some of the questions a large company would ask during the interview of a "co-lo" or co-location facility, during the sales process. Why should your business be any different?

Asking the following questions and obtaining answers that satisfy you is another step in your security chain:

Environmental Questions about the Facility

Site Monitoring and Protection

These are some basic questions that will help you have a secure hosting environment. Keep in mind that not all questions may be answerable from the sales person's head, but they should be able to locate it quickly.

Patching and Security

We'll discuss patching soon; however, it is important to gain an understanding about patching of the O/S and the web server (in our example, Linux and Apache.) For instance, when a critical vulnerability is discovered in the Linux kernel, you should be able to know if it affects your shared or dedicated hosts. You should know when it will be patched by the host (shared, virtual, or private), and if they maintain the O/S for you on your dedicated equipment when it will be handled. Time matters when vulnerability becomes public. Knowing the patch methodology (identification, documentation, build of the patch, testing, and deployment) is just a part and parcel of your security experience. Remember, you are ultimately responsible for the uptime and security of your site. Turning a blind eye to the host won't make you secure. They may have the task and responsibility of patching, for instance, but at the end of the day, your customers will not care whose fault it is, if you are breached. They will want you to explain it.

Shared Hosting

In essence, shared hosting is renting space on a server. This, by far, is the most economical route to get your website published, and the author would venture to guess the most common route. This means they "carve out" a small portion of the server's bandwidth, CPU, memory, and disk and assign it to you. You may see something like the following screenshot when you FTP in:

As you can see, there are several shared server folders displayed, namely, the public_html and www folders. These may vary based on your host, but the point is "above" these folders are areas that their administrators can see, but we cannot. Next in the directory there would be another set of folders that host another website. We don't have the appropriate permissions to see them or interact with them. The memory, disk, CPU, network bandwidth, and other portions of the server are shared with everyone on this physical server. This shared model is economical because the cost to run it is spread across many websites. The hosting company is responsible for patching the systems and ensuring their uptime and maintenance. You are only responsible for your own.

One situation that can arise through the shared model is, if a "neighbor" website is compromised (meaning, broken into by a 'cracker'), your site may be attacked as well. The attackers, depending on how deeply they are able to penetrate, can often wreak havoc on a box, destroying everything in their path. If a host finds out that the attack originated through your website, it is likely to cancel your account or shut you down till you can prove that you have patched your stuff. For instance, let's say you were running an older version of Joomla!, one with a renowned and well-published exploit. Now, if a young punk in a cyber café finds your site to be open and cracks your site, defaces it, and then laughs and goes on leaving you holding the bag, the host is not going to try to block the entire country of the attack's origin. The host will simply lock down your site and account after they clean up. They get real grumpy over this. They feel it's your responsibility to keep up with patching your own site.

A good place to check for exploited software is the online searchable database: http://osvdb.org/search.php.

Patching is a way of life if you have a website, and it is something that we'll spend time on later. For now, keep in mind that if you have a site, you should take the appropriate time, review the forums, search the databases, and check the extension sites to make sure that you are not running anything that has exposed flaws.

Shared hosting almost always comes with a control panel much like the following screenshot, known as cPanel:

As you can see in the previous figure, we can tell many things about our site, such as the number of MySQL databases we can have, our shared hosting IP address, and more. Here is where we would control the setup of our databases, other applications, and things like backups, FTP, stats, and more. Each host may vary in what its control panel looks like. However, many hosts do use the cPanel hosting applet. Dedicated hosting often uses the same panel and features, but exceptions abound.

Dedicated Hosting

Often a dedicated host is what you will choose if you want the full power of the server. You might want this if you are expecting a ton of traffic to the site, in which you would not want to "share" the resources of the box.

In this case, you will have to either administer the system or pay the host to administer the box for you. You probably will have to do the patching of the operating system, in addition to the other components. You may not have to keep the hardware running, as you are renting an entire box.

Other forms of dedicated hosting are when you purchase the hardware yourself and place it into a co-location facility. Known as a co-lo, these businesses provide you "pipe, power, and ping". In other words, they will give you a secure place to house your machine, provide the power, provision the IP address, and provide security.

Both these options are very costly, with the last one being the most time and money consuming on your part.

How do you choose what to do? If you are starting out for the first time, a convenient and economical choice is to go with the shared hosting, month-to-month. This way, if you discover problems with the hosting, you can always move and not incur a great deal of expense.

Again, the author does not make any recommendations for hosting; however, a couple of great places to start your search are:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

http://whreviews.com/searchstrategy.htm

These two sites can provide you with a great deal of knowledge about different hosts, their costs, the level of support you can expect and so forth.

In this book, we are going to focus on the Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP environment, and as such, you can review hosts that support this environment as well as the Joomla! environment.

If you have friends who have a website, ask them how the support is. Call into the tech support and see how open and friendly they are to help you as a prospective customer. If they won't help you as a prospect, you can rest assured you won't get help as a customer.

As you work towards making a decision, ask about your ability to change several of the key variables such as open_base_dir, safe_mode, register_globals and others that are important in supporting your site in a secure manner. Be sure to inquire how you will change those, if they have to be changed and so on. Sometimes you have access to the .htaccess for your shared host, and sometimes you don't (this doesn't apply in dedicated because you have complete control), and this is important to know.

As at the time of this writing, there is a definitive line drawn in the sand in the Joomla! world about allowing or not allowing encrypted extensions. No matter which side of debate your feelings are, if you decide to purchase and use an encrypted extension, make sure in advance of your purchase that your host supports Zend or IONcube (depending on the app), or whatever means that may be deployed. If they don't, you will have to attempt to get your money back, change hosts or discover a method to make them work. Translation, do your homework in advance.

Your border security begins with the host where your site is residing. If you choose a poorly run host, then expect trouble, successful attacks, and more. That is not to say that a well run host is free from attacks. It just lowers some of the obvious problems.

Take time to learn all you can about the prospective host, but don't base your purchase on price and flashy sales pitches by the host.