“As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realize there's not much left. Cause I've been brassing and laughing so long that, Even my mamma thinks…” Wait, wait, wait… uh, well maybe that’s a bit too strong. $3.99 a month for 500 MB of space and unlimited bandwidth, WOW! “Deal or No Deal?!“
Website hosting isn’t just hosting. Your company’s decision is more important that you may believe; and the cheapest solution may not do you justice. Be careful about getting locked up in a contract with the wrong domain landlord.
First off, what the heck is hosting anyway?
Hosting is like a home for your website. Every website needs a place to live. Thus, every website is physically located on some computer system, somewhere. Those computers are called “Host Servers.” They are usually owned and operated by a web hosting company that has a considerable investment in the hosting environment, security, bandwidth and infrastructure.
However, often that is not the case. There are amateur facilities everywhere running hosting servers that don’t provide the necessary fundamentals of a solid hosting environment. These slumlords run cheap equipment in poorly organized datacenters or makeshift network operating centers.
Also, businesses of all sizes sometimes choose to host their own websites on their internal network. Not the safest thing in the world. When you host a site, you are putting your server out there on the World Wide Web for anyone to see and access. If you don’t have it secured properly you could be putting your entire organization’s data at risk.
I have even seen half ass operations run out of unsecured back office closets. My suggestion here is simple, don’t be fooled by imitations.
Security is primary always. What is the point of creating something and investing valuable time and resources if you just leave it out there for the wolves? Protect you investment by making sure that the hosting facility if properly protected. And I mean protected physically as well as logically.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. This is really easy to accomplish. FTP backup for next to nothing can add an extra think pillow to the bed and let you rest easy. The fundamental here is to try to avoid single points of failure, and never let your data be one.
Bandwidth, the highway or cobblestone drive. Let’s get one thing clear, a T-1 line is not considered very large to the hosting world. And anyone who tells you that they are hosting your company’s website on a single T-1 line I guarantee doesn’t know too much about hosting.
I work with 2 datacenters that tout layered OC 192s and 48s. What the heck does that mean??? Consider this analogy, if your T-1 line was a lane one foot in width, a single OC 192 would be over a mile wide. You will be able to pass over 6500 times as much data in a single second.
Support. Well this is an easy one. There are so many inexpensive “unmanaged” solutions out there that don’t really give a damn about you as a customer. If you have a problem, the only support is via e-mail. I’ve transferred clients away from several hosting facilities that don’t even have phone numbers on their website. My theory is, that if a company posts their tech support number and they answer it when you call, then their system must work pretty well.
Try calling Yahoo’s hosting support and getting a hold of their registry department. They use Melbourne IT down in Australia. Nearly impossible to get them to assist you. And that goes to show, that just because a company is of size, that doesn’t mean they have a good solution either.
Up-Time Guarantee. Well what is a guarantee without proof? You can request server logs to actually see the proof, but then you would have to know how to read them of course. 99.9% is what we offer. There is roughly 8850 hours in a year and a 99.9% uptime guarantee allows for roughly 9 hours of downtime for maintenance and service. Lat year we were down a total of 6.5 hours.
Of course the higher guarantee the better, but usually the more costly as well. Lots of companies offer 99% or even 98% uptime guarantee. But to tell the truth, that allows for a lot of leeway. Do the math. Understand one thing, just because you have a guarantee, don’t think for a second that your site will never be down.
Features and Manageability. Windows vs. Linux, PHP vs. ASP, SQL vs. MySql, ftp, e-mail, stats, backup, scripting, shell access, the list goes on and on. There are so many variables out there, you really need to know what you are looking for and speak to someone that you can trust to tell you what the best is.
Well running out of space here, I hope you can read this over to get a little better perspective about hosting. There are loads of details that I didn’t cover on the types of hosting plans. So tell me, what's the difference between managed, private, virtual and dedicated hosting? Well perhaps we can get to that next month.
“Tell me why are we so blind to see…” I don’t really think Coolio knew his song would be analogous with web hosting. LOL Have a nice day.
