• Visitors will come back to your web site regularly if you constantly refresh it with interesting or exciting information.
• Check for the broken link.
• Daily, weekly or monthly maintenance to perform.
• Continually testing under new browsers.
• Upgrading HTML or script code to modern standards
• Running a web statistic.
• Performing various server-related activities such as upgrading software.
• Running backups for web.
• You may want to include some type of form that users can fill out to give you their opinions.

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Managing Web Server

• Server must be continually monitored for availability, performance and security.
• Checking availability might be simply a matter of utilizing a tool to "ping" the server every few minutes by sending it a small data packet to if it is alive.
• More sophisticated server monitoring actually requests a page on a site, and may even look for some key phrase or element to make sure that the page is completely formed.
• Utilize a monitoring tool or service to ensure that your site is constantly available to users.
• The responsiveness of the server should also be carefully monitored.
• Make sure that the load on a server is carefully monitored as well.

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Web Server

• There are two basic choices for publishing your HTML documents on the Internet.
• One way involves having a dedicated connection to the Internet and running your own server.
• The other approach involves renting space or bandwidth from an outside vendor to place your server or pages outside your organization.
• Web server outsourcing comes into two: shared or virtual hosting and colocation.
• The primary operation of a web server is to copy the many files making up a web page from disk to network as fast as possible for numerous simultaneous users.
• A secondary mission is to run programs for numerous individuals and deliver their results as fast as possible.
  

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Selecting a web server

• Price and performance are the basic issues for choosing a web server.
• You need to understand what kind of activity to expect and what type of data you will serve.
• Then you need to set a budget for your server.
• A personal web server might use freeware or shareware and run on a low-cost personal computer such as a PC or Macintosh.
• A large corporate system might use a powerful UNIX workstation running commercial-grade web server software.
• One of the main considerations for a web server will be the operating system used.
  

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Web Server Software

• Apache
  • A descendant of NCSA's httpd server, Apache is probably the most popular web server on the Internet, at least as far as public web sites are concerned.
  • Apache's popularity stems from the fact that it is free and fast.
  • It is also very powerful supporting features like HTTP 1.1, extended server-side includes (SSIs), module architecture similar to NSAPI/ISAPI, and numerous free modules that perform functions such as server-based Perl interpretation.
  • Apache is not a commercial package.
  • Apache is mainly for UNIX.

   

• Microsoft Internet Information Services
  • IIS is Microsoft's server for Windows NT.
  • One very important aspect of IIS is that it is very tightly integrated with the Windows NT environment.
  • ISS is freely bundled with the operating system.

   

• IPlanet: Servers Formerly Known as Netscape
  • iPlanet the new software concern born of the Sun-Netscape alliance formed after the merger between Netscape and AOL, has a larger number of web servers.
  • Can run on most major variants of UNIX as well as Windows NT.
  • The servers are well developed and also very developer friendly and powerful, with support for database and directory services, content management, HTTP 1.1, and a variety of other features.
  • It is also a cross-platform server.

   

• WebSite
  • A very easy-to-use web server for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT, O'Reilly's WebSite is one of the few robust web servers available for Windows 95/98.
  • WebSite is considered one of the easiest servers to install and administer.

   

• WebStar
  • The most popular web server for the Macintosh was originally based on MacHTTPD.
  • WebStar integrates well with the Macintosh.
  • It supports AppleScript and other Macintosh-specific tools.

   

• Lotus Domino
  • Domino is an example of the collision between traditional web serving and messaging and groupware.
  • Domino runs on Windows NT, variants of UNIX, and even large IBM systems such as AS/400s, and is often used in corporate intranet and extranet environments where workflow and integration with messaging and backend system may be more important than raw web serving performance.

   

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Web Hosting

• Web hosting involves using the shared server facilities of a hosting vendor.
• This means that the site will share web server resources and bandwidth with other hosted sites.
• Sharing can be problematic - server responsiveness may be significantly affected because of other hosted web sites.
• Many customers are wary of sharing a server with others, because security often cannot be guaranteed on these shared systems.
• Hosting is still relatively inexpensive.
• Many Internet Service Providers (ISP) and specialized hosting companies offer professional-quality shared web-hosting services.
• The other web server outsourcing option is often called colocation. This describes the use of a dedicated server, often owned by the organization purchasing the service.
• Colocation provides a greater degree of autonomy than shared web services.
• The colocated machine typically only shares physical facilities, and possibly network bandwidth, with other customers.
• Colocation is generally more expensive than hosting.
• Many of the large ISPs offer colocation services as well as specialized data center providers.
  

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Web Publishing | Client/Server Environment