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Design and Development
Imagine you're lucky enough to take this weekend off and travel to a warm island for a quick, relaxing mini-vacation. Then, reality sets in when you return. Your e-mail inbox has 578 messages—your Web site was unavailable the entire weekend and your visitors couldn't order your products.
There are thousands of hosting companies available, but how do you know what's right for you? What questions should you ask? Which companies should you avoid?
Hosting has become a commodity. In fact, it's easy to find free hosting services. But free hosting is useless when your site is down, unavailable, and not accepting orders.
Here's a mini-checklist to help you make better choices:
1. Is Your Site Always Available?
When the electricity goes out, you know about it immediately and take action to get it back on. Here in the United States, we have very reliable sources of energy to keep our stores and offices energized to serve our customers. But that's not the case with Web hosting. It's rare to find a hosting company that serves your pages 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Try to find a provider with a 99.5 percent or better uptime record. Even at that rate, your site is unavailable almost two full days a year. You can monitor uptime stats every five minutes—check out http://www.WatchDog247.com .
2. Bigger Might Be Better.
Generally speaking, bigger hosts are usually better for you. They usually offer super-fast information pipes (a.k.a. backbones), feature round-the-clock security (so your data is monitored against theft), and have on-site backup power if electric service is out.
Smaller companies might initially offer better, friendlier service, but that usually fades as they expand and face growing pains.
3. Can You Get Your Questions Answered?
Fast and friendly tech support is a must. A growing number of hosting companies can enroll you over the 'Net in just a few minutes. But what happens if your site is down and you need to talk to a human?
Is the telephone call to tech support free? There's nothing more frustrating than waiting AND paying while on hold for 45 minutes.
One great way to test is to call tech support on a Sunday at 10 p.m. or Wednesday at 3 p.m. If you leave a voice-mail message, does someone call you back right away? Give the hosting company bonus points if you get answers to your questions on major holidays.
Avoid hosting companies that offer free e-mail tech support only. There are far too many hosting companies with live telephone tech support.
4. Is it a Microsoft(R) Preferred Provider?
Microsoft FrontPage is one of the most popular Web-design software packages in use today. Does the hosting company support FrontPage server extension uploads? Is the hosting company approved by Microsoft?
Think about the future and your needs. If your site needs to grow and you need a database program like Cold Fusion or e-commerce software like Miva Merchant (a $495.00 value), does the hosting company offer it free? If so, you can save hundreds to thousands of dollars by not having to buy it yourself.
5. Should You Ask for Long-Term Contracts?
Here's advice no hosting company wants you to know : Don't sign up for long-term contracts. Find companies that offer service month-to-month. When you prepay a year's contract and the company merges with a weaker company (or worse, closes), you can possibly lose your prepayment. Is it worth risking your money to save 10 to 15 percent?
The leading hosting firms do not require any long-term contracts.
6. Can You Access Your Server Logs?
Every time there's a transaction on your site, your hosting company records it as a simple entry log. Does the hosting company include free direct access to these logs? They hold a gold mine of marketing data—for example, what pages are most popular, what's the busiest day for traffic, or even what broken links need to be relinked.
7. Have Fewer Neighbors.
Unless you pay to have dedicated hosting services, you're going to share disk space with other Web sites. Find a hosting company that never exceeds 70 percent disk-drive space. That is, 70 percent of the computer's hard disk is allotted for site serving. When servers are packed near capacity, performance can slow down.
In order to lower costs, hosting companies might sign up many new accounts and fill each server to capacity. It's like cramming 10 people into a Yugo. It can be done, but you run the risk of your neighbor's traffic hogging the pipeline to your Web pages (and significantly increasing the wait time for your Web visitors).
In addition, a hosting company's Internet bandwidth should never exceed 50 percent of its average capacity. During peak times, it's important to have the excess capacity to handle a rush of traffic to your site (or the other sites shared on the server).
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