Website Hosting Necessities: Things To Look For
When determining where to get website hosting, you need to consider a variety of things such as your chosen provider’s reliability, their customer service, the types of utilities you plan to run, and how busy your site is going to be. Reliability – No One Visits a Closed Store It’s a valid analogy – if your website doesn’t allow customers to visit because the server is down, it’s as good as having an unexpectedly-closed store. Worse, in some ways, because those customers who can’t access your site may never try to come back. Your customers need to be able to access your website 24/7 – no exceptions. If the server hosting your website goes down, it reflects poorly on you. You can find out how often it goes down by examining your web logs – which your website host can provide for you. Running the logs through a free log-translating utility – which, again, your host can provide for you or direct you to – will return a report that tells you clearly what percentage of time your site was accessible. You can also go to websites such as Alertra that rate hosting reliability. Your customers should have adequate bandwidth to reliably and quickly access your pages; if you have lots of graphics, movies, music, or other large files downloading, you need more bandwidth; and if you have a busy site, your bandwidth needs increase commensurately. Be completely honest with your host about your bandwidth needs, and be ready to adjust your contracted package if your website hosting provider recommends it; with more shoppers, you should sell more product. Customer Service – The Human Side of Website Hosting With good website hosting should come great customer service. If your hosting provider is not providing the information you need, or is not providing it in a timely manner, you are losing money. The best website hosting providers are going to not only provide information on request, but in fact be proactive with information, delivering it to you before you even know you need it. Customer service representatives should be able to answer questions in plain English and be responsive to any reasonable request. Any adjustments to your website hosting needs should be made in a timely manner, upon your first request. If something you need cannot be done, the representative should not only tell you that it can’t be done, but also provide you with a reasonable alternative for achieving your goal. Backend Necessities – Shopping Carts and Catalogs Which brings me to the most common issue you’ll have with your website hosting provider: problems with the software you need to run on your site. You can’t just run out to Office Max