Every now and then, I take a look at my websites, wishing they would become popular enough to hit the front pages of Digg or sites alike. But when your website gets significant traffic, can your web host handle it? Being on a shared hosting environment, the answer most likely is no. Being ambitious though, I looked into where I would head next for web hosting package in the short future.

Virtual Private Server

One option I looked into is Virtual Private Server (VPS). VPS is great for someone who wants more power and capacity than a shared web hosting, but can’t afford the cost of a dedicated server. VPS utilises virtualisation software that sits between the operating system and the physical hardware resources. Having a VPS allows you to have your own installation of operating system in an isolated environment. With lighter and faster web servers emerging, the Apache web server is no longer the only open source favourite. VPS allows you to have root access, you can therefore install your own web server configured to individual needs. So VPS sounds great and affordable, until recently…

“Cloud Computing” Infrastructure

The recent buzz on the Google App Engine have brought cloud computing infrastructure to my attention.

For this preview release, Google is providing this new service totally free to developers who would like to build their web application on, apparently, the backbone that Google applications (such as Google Docs) uses.

There are plenty of advantages using the Google App Engine. With the power and redundancy harnessed from Google’s computer hardwares and already established infrastructure, we will never have to worry about load balancing or configuring multiple servers. As these are already done for us, the application hosted on the Google servers have instant scalability. Persistent storage is achieved by Google’s robust Bigtable and Google File System, which perhaps would make database backup less of a concern. And with Google Account authentication system, we don’t even have to worry about users management anymore.

The only barrier (to me, anyway) is that the App Engine currently only support one programming language - Python. It seems easy enough to understand, but perhaps difficult to master. There is a great possibility that they will also support other languages in the future, such as PHP and Ruby on Rails.

The Future of Web Hosting

Google App Engine offers enormous power with their infrastructure and lowers the barrier for web applications with traffic load concern. But will this influence the way other virtualisation and hosting companies do their business? I think only time will tell. Meanwhile, I will just cross my fingers and hope for Google to roll out PHP support on the App Engine.

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