Business Learning Center

Having a reliable web hosting service is absolutely critical to the success of your business. While web hosting may be a small investment for your company, the damage caused by an unreliable web host can be immeasurable.

Obviously, the biggest worry surrounding web hosting is “down time.” This occurs where there is a service failure at the web hosting facility. A single, extended outage can anger your visitors as can regular, shorter outages.

Extended down time reflects badly on your brand, costs you sales and can send your customers to your competitors.

The bad news is that there’s no such thing as a web host with 100% up time. Virtually every major site, including Amazon.com and Twitter.com, has been hit with hosting issues at one time or another. Nevertheless, some hosting companies are far more reliable than others.

When choosing your web hosting company, there are a number of factors to look for:

• Reliability
• Speed of access
• Scalability/bandwidth
• Shared server versus dedicated server
• FTP access
• Security
• Pricing
• Support

Reliability and “Guarantees”

There are thousands of web hosting companies out there and they all want your business. Virtually all guarantee uptime of 99% or more. But what does this really mean? In a 30-day month, 1% downtime means 7.2 hours of downtime. Depending on when in the day the downtime occurs could mean serious loss of sales or damage to customer loyalty.

Furthermore, the guarantees don’t mean very much. The hosting company doesn’t compensate you for loss of sales or loss of customers. They simply reimburse the difference between the guaranteed uptime and the actual uptime.

Let’s say you get a guarantee of 100% uptime and your host delivers 90%. That means you’ve lost three entire days of service over the month. Your only compensation is 10% of the monthly hosting fee. Such a refund wouldn’t begin to cover the loss of good-will and sales caused by your site being down for a total of three days out of a month.

What’s the solution? There is something to be said for safety in numbers. Hosting companies like Go Daddy, Enom, Network Solutions Yahoo and Register.com all host over a million sites, with Go Daddy leading the way with 25 million.

Size generally gives you guarantees of 24/7 service, sufficient bandwidth and top-of-the-line security.

Scalability/Bandwidth

Your business may be small now, but you will want to be with a hosting company that can handle traffic to your site as it grows. A site with 10,000 visitors a month has very different bandwidth needs than a site with 100,000 visitors. Also, if you have a new advertising or marketing campaign, can your host handle a sudden spike in traffic? How much will your host charge for bandwidth overages (above the contract specification for bandwidth)?

Again, by going with one of the major hosting companies, you won’t have to worry about capacity issues.

Shared Server versus Dedicated Server

Most websites can be handled comfortably by a shared server. Blogs, start-ups, informational sites rarely have the kind of traffic that demands a server dedicated to the client’s business. But if you are a larger company and if you have a large database or e-commerce capacities, it would serve you well to choose the dedicated server option from your web hosting service.

This option lets you decide on the exact capabilities you require, like bandwidth, RAM, capacity for files and databases, and processor speed.

Speed of Access

Compare the RAM available for your site. The more RAM available, the quicker pages will load and the quicker photographs and video can be delivered to your audience. You pay for RAM, so it is important to figure out exactly how much you need. For a simple site without complex databases or applications, the standard 256 to 512 MB (included in most shared hosting plans) will suffice. For a complex ecommerce or social networking website, you might need 2 to 4 GB.

FTP Access

Many small businesses make the mistake of going with the cheapest options for FTP, which is the most common protocol for uploading website files to the web server.

However, these cheap packages often require webmasters to design pages with their cookie cutter webpage builder, and may only give you limited ways of uploading new and edited web pages.

Any business site with even the potential of growing and expanding, needs both access and flexibility in the ability to upload web pages.

Security

You don’t have to be particularly tech-savvy to know how damaging a computer virus can be. Your entire website can be taken down and your online business can be destroyed by a single malicious virus. When choosing a hosting company, make sure they not only have the very best security in place, but make sure they have a team capable of staying ahead of the curve. (Another reason you are safest going with the heavy hitters in the web hosting business.)

Pricing

As I said earlier, web hosting is a relative bargain. This is not the area where companies should be economizing. The one issue companies should really look out for is bandwidth overages. When you agree to a level of bandwidth requirements some hosting companies hit you hard when traffic spikes send you over the contractual bandwidth levels. This is an area worth some comparison shopping. In most cases it’s great news if your website is getting more traffic than you expected, but your needs should be reevaluated from time to time to make sure you’re getting the most for your web hosting dollar.

Support

Here’s another area where it’s worth doing your homework. Customer service does vary from company to company. Test out the responsiveness and helpfulness of customer support when you are shopping for a web hosting company.

In Conclusion

There are enough things to worry about when you are running a business. Web hosting should be one of the least of your worries. This is an area where you can really depend on some of the major players in the business, but don’t be afraid to test your potential hosts and don’t be reluctant to leave your web host if you are not happy with the service they deliver.
For questions concerning website hosting or any other questions relating to website design, development or marketing, please give Blue Fountain Media a call at 212.260.1978.