The basics of choosing your hosting platform and programming language.

        The first thing you have to be aware of is that the Internet is a big chaos, that have small parts controllable, but nobody can controll it 100%. Because of this, nobody can select the people who surf on the Internet, so there is a big variety of people who do it. Some of them, are spending their time trying to access sites unauthorized. Your site is the key of your e-business, so you have to be careful with the security. You don't want to wake up in the morning, visit your site and to see a totally different content.

        Hackers are concentrating their efforts on web-based applications - 75% of cyber attacks are done at the web application level, a Gartner Group study has revealed: Web application security has become a priority in any organization. The reasons for this are clear: Web applications control valuable data and are much more difficult to secure. Firewalls and SSL provide no protection against web application hacking, simply because access to the website has to be made publicly available! Web applications are posted on the Internet and can be attacked 24/7 and often have direct access to backend data such as customer databases. Besides, web applications are often tailor-made and therefore tested less than off-the-shelf software, and are consequently more susceptible to attack.

        Various high profile site attacks have amply shown that it is futile having your firewall perfectly configured and your OS and key applications at the latest patch level, if your web application can be compromised in a matter of minutes, granting hackers access to your   backend data. For a more comprehensive security strategy, it is therefore essential that you regularly audit the security of your web applications.

        As you can see, because of his nature, the web service cannot be protected using firewalls. The key to security is a good platform, and a good code in the background of your site. Also, you must know that there is no 100% safe platform and also no programmer in this world can do a perfect code, there are no bug-free products. But, you can look for the best possible in order to keep your site safe, up and running.

        The server platform

         At this point, most popular hosting platforms are Microsoft, Linux, BSD and Unix. We will speak about each one in a few words, just to make yourself a general ideea.

        Microsoft platform - It uses Microsoft's operating system and it can be found in many different versions such as : Windows NT Server, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP Proffessional. The most advanced platform is Windows XP at the moment, and if you want to have your site running on Microsoft platform, you should choose the XP version. The advantages of using Microsoft platform, is that the operating system is delivered to the buyer in binary format. That means nobody can view the source code of the operating system's core. Since the source code is private, no hacker can see how the things works internaly and this will decrease the security risks. However hackers can do reverse-engineering and with lots of testing, they can discover security risks and they can exploit them. The disadvantage is that, you don't actually know what runs on your server - maybe the server have attached a process that "sniff" all your activity and report it somewhere. Also a big disadvantage is the vulnerability to viruses. There are over 400.000 viruses for Microsoft's platform. This means you will have to buy an aditional anti-virus, to protect your server. Also, when a security problem appears , regarding Microsoft platform, it takes too much to release a patch to fix the problem. This means, that in all this time, until they release the patch, your server may be vulnerable to attacks, which can make your business unstable. Another big disadvantage is that Microsoft's products are made by a limited team (hired workers). This means that they can improve the product but with a limit (which maybe they achieved at this time).

        Linux platform - This kind of platform offers you more flexibility. It was build at the begining as a copy of the UNIX operating system, with the difference that it runs on PCs. The Linux operating system have many distributions like Fedora, RedHat, CentOS, Gentoo, Slackware, Debian, etc. Basicaly the things work this way: some coder creates a open source software that can be considered a very good tool and the companies that creates Linux distributions, take the software, test it and then they pack it into their distribution kit. This means that the distributions are similar, just the package management, testing and the installation kit are different. The interesting point of Linux, is that the software is free (under GPL License), and you can download the source at any time and see how your operating system works. This makes it more vulnerable to hackers, which can see easy in the source code if they can exploit anything. This is not a bad thing, because Linux users created large communities and they all participate to improve the final product. Usually when a "bug" is found, first time the person who found it releases the patch, and after some time releases the exploit code , allowing to the system administrators to fix their servers. The exploit codes are released to be used to determine if your server is vulnerable or not , but not to harm others. The big advantages of Linux platforms is that there are too few viruses that can do any harm (about 3-4 and they not transmit themselves as worms, you can get a virus if you run it yourself on the server), there are no limits of this product, since it is developed world wide, security patches are very fast released (since there are thousands , maybe millions of software contributors) - this makes the security risks lower. Lately the Linux packages didn't presented high security problems. It's highly recommended to use this platform for your hosting server.

        BSD Platform - This kind of platform is similar with the Linux platform. Internally the operating system works different, but the features and the way this kind of platform is developed is the same with Linux platform. BSD distributions : FreeBSD, NetBSD.

       UNIX Platform - Since Linux was developed initially as a UNIX copy for the PCs, they are pretty similar. Excepting the fact that UNIX is developed by SCO Unix, and it aint free. Ofcourse, there are many UNIX versions, but most of them are not free.

        Since now you know a few basics about a platform , you should start looking for web hosting providers and check for prices. You should keep a list of the prices you found on the market. You also have as an alternative a free hosting. There are companies that offers to host your site for free, but in exchange they display automaticly ads on your site (and you cannot hide their ads). This isn't a good option since your site is business oriented, or even your site's purpose is to display ads, you will have enough ads/banners shown by yourself, why to show provider's ads too?

        The programming language

        Choosing the programming language for your web site is not an easy task. Your goal is to not get to expensive with the coder who will do your site, but also you have to make sure that in time you will allways have a coder that can modify your site. It's not reliable to choose a programming language that in a few years will die and it won't be used anymore - if so, you will be in big troubles to apply changes to your site because you probably won't find a programmer to do this for you. Your task is to check on the programming market, to evaluate your costs with the programming of your site, and also to estimate if the chosen programming language will have a long life. The programming language should be choosen based on the server platform you already chosen. For Microsoft platform, you can choose a programming language like ASP, PHP, PERL, Python, Ruby. For any Linux version, UNIX or BSD, you can choose between PHP, PERL, Python, Ruby.

ASP - This is Microsoft's programming language for web pages. This programming language, was designed to run on Microsoft platform. Either if there are some addons for Linux systems to run ASP, it is highly recommended to use ASP only with a Microsoft platform. However this is not a very good programming language since the number of programmers has become very small. Also, anything related to Microsoft is usually very expensive.
PERL - This is an advanced programming language and it is mature (born in 1987). It haves hundreds of modules, making the programming easy. Originaly it was designed for Linux/UNIX/BSD platform, but it was later imported on Microsoft Windows platform. Over time,  PERL programming language demonstrated that it is a very powerfull language and become very popular. You can easy find programmers but not at very low prices (but lower than ASP programmers usually).
PHP - This is one of the most popular programming languages for dynamic websites. It was originaly designed as a much like PERL, with minimum of functions, only for web environment. The first versions of this programming language was for both platforms (Microsoft and Linux/UNIX/BSD). Since is very easy to learn,  there are lots of programmers all over the world. The bad thing is that since it is so easy to learn (at least the basics), there are many programmers that doesn't know very well the PHP structure and they can write messy code. However PHP programmers are very cheap, probably the cheapest you can find for this job.
Python - this is a powerful programming language - it is not evolved as PERL, but it is very fast (born around 1991). Python wasn't so popular as perl over time. Lately the developers of python enhanced his engine, and now it is a good option. Since the popularity was low, there are too few programmers available and also they are expensive.
Ruby - this is the newest programming language you can use for your site. It was designed originaly for Linux, but it is very flexible and very easy to use on Microsoft platform. It is a very new programming language (born around 2003-2004), but it already is mature since it haves everything you need to create dynamic web pages with database backend. Since is so new on the market, there are few programmers to buy and they will ask for large payments. Also note that not every hosting provider offer Ruby support.

        Choosing your programmer

        Choosing the programmer who will do your work, is the hardest thing in this issue. You will need to choose a man/woman, good as person, very responsible and very comunicative. It is highly recommended to ask for work samples even if you are not a programmer, just to make an ideea about how the person you are about to hire works. There are many people that claim they are good but reality is different, so watch out for this!!!.

        Ofcourse, you can go backward, and start with choosing the programmer (based on the price he asks), then to choose the platform (based on the programmer's choice). But doing it backward, will not give you flexibility to choose what you belive it's better for your website, so be careful with this.

Oliver Cage is a contributor for http://ikoupon.com and http://simbiotiq.com