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Where Is Your Hosting Backbone?

Published Monday, August 4, 2008 by bloggerblognet22596 | E-mail this post

Your hosting company's backbone is critical to today's Internet Marketers need for speed. No, this doesn't mean that your hosting company has to stand up straight and throw its shoulders back and zoom off someplace or exhibit some adolescent bravado with a hot car!

Your hosting company's backbone is a high-speed series of connections that become a major pathway within a network. The better this backbone network functions determines how fast the web sites that run on their servers load when your customers click on your link.

A network backbone can take several forms, the simplest being devices attached to a long cable, like in a small library or office. A simple network can be created with several computers, all connected by cable connections to the same server or database.

A more complicated form of a network backbone involves Hubs or Switches. A Hub is a computer connecting several other computers together. Network switches are capable of inspecting data packets as they are received, determining the source and destination device of that packet, and forwarding it appropriately.

When the devices are routers to Local Area Networks (LAN) or Wide Area Networks (WAN), you have a backbone of considerable size. A router is a device that extracts the destination of a packet it receives, selects the best path to that destination, and forwards data packets to the next device along this path. They connect networks together; a LAN to a WAN for example, to access the Internet.

The Local Area Network covers a small area like a building or group of buildings, an office or a single home. Their notable characteristic is much higher speed for data transfer than a WAN.

Some examples of a Wide Area Network could be a university backbone, connecting several campuses for student, faculty and alumni access or a major corporation's backbone serving offices all over the country, or in other countries. The most famous WAN is the Internet, connecting the entire world through routers and networks.

Other networks riding on backbones of various sizes are PANS (personal area networks), CANS (campus area networks), MANS (metropolitan area networks).

All of these different networks serve a specific area, large or small, through a series of hubs, switches or routers that that make up the network's backbone, controlling data transfer speed, direction and delivery. Some deliver the data packet to a specific computer, others to a specific network initially, with the router on that end sending it on to the next stop on the way to its final destination.

The success of Internet Marketing projects depends on the reliability of hosting providers and the satisfaction level customers have with page loading, information processing and product delivery on your site. And all of this process depends on the strength, reliability and speed of your hosting provider's backbone.

Dan Thompson is a veteran website designer and has used numerous web hosts in his time. Dan specializes in writing web host reviews, his latest article is a Hostmonster Review You can view Dan's latest web hosting review at http://www.hostmonster-the-review.com