The backbone of your hosting business is critical to today’s internet marketers’ need for speed. No, this doesn’t mean your hosting company has to sit up and throw their shoulders back and drive off somewhere or display some teenage bravado with a hot car!
The backbone of your hosting business is a series of high-speed connections that become a major pathway within a network. The best performance of this backbone network determines how fast websites running on your servers load when your customers click on your link.
A network backbone can take several forms, the simplest being devices connected to a long cable, such as 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 backbone network involves hubs or switches. A hub is a computer that connects several other computers together. Network switches can inspect data packets as they are received, determine the source and destination device for that packet, and forward it appropriately.
When the devices are routers to local area networks (LANs) or wide area networks (WANs), you have a sizable backbone. A router is a device that extracts the destination from a packet it receives, selects the best path to that destination, and forwards the data packets to the next device along this path. They connect networks to each other; a LAN to a WAN, for example, to access the Internet.
The local area network covers a small area such as a building or group of buildings, an office, or a single house. Its notable feature is a much higher speed for data transfer than a WAN.
Some examples of a wide area network might be the backbone of a university, which connects multiple campuses for access by students, faculty, and alumni, or the backbone of a major corporation, serving offices across the country or in other countries. The most famous WAN is the Internet, which connects the whole world through routers and networks.
Other networks that are based 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 form the backbone of the network and control the speed, direction, and delivery of data transfer. Some deliver the data packet to a specific computer, others to a specific network initially, and the router on that end forwards it 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 level of customer satisfaction with page loading, information processing and product delivery on your site. And this whole process depends on the strength, reliability and speed of your hosting provider’s backbone.
