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One of the forces defying the pundits is the increased ISP activity of value-added resellers (VARs). Many if not most of these ISPs also offer Web-hosting services to individuals and small-to-medium-sized businesses--in addition to dial-up services. Some ISPs also have increased their offerings to include hosting larger sites. The downside is some ISPs are growing so fast, they are unab le to provide the level of support larger companies require.

Another Web model is hosting without dial-up connectivity. Vendors of custom software products, such as Dataware Technologies with its Electronic Publishing System, are increasingly offering similar services. Some Web content designers even have begun to host their clients' sites. This is the route that Ironlight Digital and other boutique shops have taken. While Ironlight accepts clients who do not use its design services, others accept only sites they have designed. As with ISPs, we would not be surprised if instead of consolidation, we see continued VAR-driven growth in the number of hosting providers.

To gather accurate information about the state of Web-hosting services, we evaluated 11 service providers. ANS Communications, AT&T, BBN Planet, Epoch Networks, IBM Global Network, InterNex Information Services, Ironlight Digital, MCI Communications Corp., UUNET Technologies, PSINet and USWeb Corp. graciously lent us a hand. Although th e number of entrants into this business arena is staggering, we have made no attempt to include all of them.

What Is Web Hosting? Web hosting is the practice of outsourcing Web resources. Many IS shops have chosen not to invest the time and money necessary to support Web technology. Web hosting can provide you with an almost instant Web environment that won't burden your corporate LAN/WAN with additional traffic, and it reduces the need to retrain your over-worked staff, provides 7x24x365 support and lowers overall costs.

Web-hosting server options are divided into three main types: dedicated, collocated and shared. Dedicated servers have only one company per machine, but large sites may be made up of multiple dedicated servers. Advantages to dedicated servers are speed, added security and the availability of a firewall for intranet applications. Collocated servers are dedicated servers that you own and load with your software and are housed in a commercial Web-hosting facility for connect ivity reasons as well as maintenance and support.

Shared servers host a number of different companies' Web sites, depending on the size of the machine and the size of the sites themselves, and can be reasonably priced. Database, electronic commerce, audio and video servers also can be shared, giving the budget conscious access to big-league performance and functionality at a fraction of the cost.

We found that the typical Web-hosting facility (also known as a Web farm, server farm or host LAN) is comprised of a group of servers linked by a shared or dedicated 10-Mbps Ethernet, 100-Mbps Ethernet and/or FDDI infrastructure.

Backbones are usually DS-3 (T3) lines. If the backbone is redundant, then more than one line is going to the network provider and the load is sized so that if one line fails, the other line can handle the load. If the backbone is multihomed, lines are leased from different carriers.

Redundancy We were surprised to find that with the exception of backbones, most Fort une 1,000 companies are not very concerned with redundancy in the host LAN, nor are they interested in geographically dispersed mirrored Web servers or disaster recovery. Most seem to be taking a wait-and-see attit ude toward the Internet, preferring to put their major investment into site design while keeping their hosting expenses modest. Naturally, companies with active sites having more than 1 million hits per day and those with substantial electronic commerce tend to have more of a desire for redundancy.