Believe it or not, there was a time when having a Web site was little more than a luxury. Only the largest firms could afford one, and the number of people who used the Web to shop or scope out companies was next to nil.

Times change. These days, you’re nowhere without a Web site, now considered a basic and even vital business tool, your corporate face to the world.

Of course, having a Web site means owning or renting the equipment to run it—the servers, connections, and other sundry hardware that keeps a site online. But if you’re just setting up your site, should you outsource the hosting or do it in-house? And if you have a site that’s about to expand, what are your options? What’s the best way to run your infrastructure?

For The First-Timers

If you’re a new business and you’re just building your Web presence, one of the biggest decisions you’ll face is where to host it—in-house or out. Each has its pros and cons.

If you outsource your Web site, you’ll pass the headache of running equipment on to someone else, in exchange for a monthly fee or a fee that’s based on traffic and throughput. And that’s not without its benefits. Most DSPs (downstream service providers) have better hardware than you can afford as a small or growing enterprise. For instance, the average DSP owns a storm- and flood-proof building with controlled access. That building is serviced by one or two local loops and connected to one (and often two) Tier 1 transit backbones. Managed backups are common, as are failover systems on carrier-grade hardware with dynamic routing and switching. Giant UPS systems and generators ensure always-on power, and redundant cooling keeps the equipment safe from heat.

What’s more, a DSP can give you a boggling array of options, such as SSL, FrontPage extensions, Web analytics, database support (MySQL or SQL Server), .NET framework (including ASP.NET and ADO.NET), XML, Perl support, and more. Unless you’re a polymath (or simply the head of an enormous IT staff), there’s no way you’ll get this in-house.

But Then Again . . .

On the other hand, there are times when you’ll need to host your Web site in-house, no matter the cost. You could, for instance, be planning a secure extranet with private data (the kind you don’t want third parties to handle), or you may be selling to Wal-Mart or other chains that put heavy demands on your SCM system.

In that case, you’ll need to build your infrastructure from scratch. At the very least you’ll need:

• Connectivity. You’ll need a fractional or dedicated T1, depending on the traffic you expect to receive.
• A Web server. Make sure you have one or more servers with more than enough RAM and CPUs to handle the stress of tens of thousands of requests.
• A firewall. A box that keeps the wrong type of traffic away from your system is a must.
• A proxy server. This box authenticates your internal users and external users with LAN access.
• A switch. You’ll need a dependable switch with dedicated bandwidth for each port.

And bear in mind, this is the least you’ll need to host your site in-house. If you have lots of traffic, you may need three—or five, or 10—servers. If you bind a database to your Web site, you’ll need a server for that, as well. And as your site grows and you get more hits, you’ll need to examine new ways of hosting your site to accommodate growth.

Plan For Growth

Far and away the simplest form of Web hosting entails a single data center (or simply a server) that stores all the site’s content. When a user requests your Web site, he’ll be able to view it quickly when he’s close to your server (say, in the same state or country). But distant requests take a longer route to connect to your server, and downloads, as a result, take more time.

This is a common problem for the growing small and medium-sized enterprise as it begins to do business in different states and even different nations. The solution? Many firms are moving away from a central data store to a distributed one, giving users in different regions the fastest route to their Web site.

Of course, distributed hosting is nothing to laugh at. To support it, you’ll need to use intelligent DNS.

Normally, a DNS server will link one domain name to a single IP address and direct the user requesting the domain to that IP address. On the other hand, with intelligent DNS, a DNS server keeps a pool of IPs for a given domain and selects one based on rules such as user location: When a client requests the IP address for your domain, the DNS server turns the request around and inspects the IP address of the client instead, to determine its location. It then directs the client to the server that’s closest to it. Thus, if you have a server in Boston and another in London, a request from Atlanta will be sent to the Boston server, while a request from Paris will be routed to London.

Of course, this is merely one way to plan for a growing Web site. Others include caching (in which the output of dynamic systems, such as a database or content management systems, is stored daily as static HTML, then served as such) and even more exotic and esoteric methods. Which is right for you? It all depends on your needs, plans, and goals. And whether you opt to distribute your Web site, cache it, host it in-house, or outsource it, you’ll be making vital decisions that can radically affect the course of your company.