The web hosting industry has become
increasingly competitive. A recent search on a popular engine with
relevant criteria returned millions of results from thousands of
organisations offering site storage solutions. There are thousands of
companies out there battling for your business - but some won't
definitely have you or your business interests in mind. Cheap web site
hosting definitely doesn't mean the best hosting and neither does
signing up with the most expensive companies guarantee you the best
service - it's a confusing world of solutions, smoke and mirrors.
Watch out for the host sharks!
Competition's a great thing, but the
frenzied levels of promotion has also forced a number of hosts to use
questionable marketing tactics and a heavy load of
activity-restricting fine print in their contracts. Many web hosting
companies don't make profits by establishing a solid customer base,
but rather by having a high turnover. The more customers they can have
signing up and then dropping off, the more dollars they make.
Of course, not all Internet hosting
services take this attitude and there are some brilliant solutions
companies out there who respect and encourage their clients. These are
the companies with a long range plan and tend to diversify into other
areas as they grow, offering their clients wider and more specialized
services such as domain name registration and site monitoring
facilities.
Internet hosting reviews strategies
Finding these gems amongst the rot is
the challenge. I know of a number of webmasters who have to change
hosting services 3 or 4 times a year! The downtime involved prevents
them doing what they do best, to maintain and develop their sites.
Many personal and commercial web site hosting companies offer the
world in their solutions, but actually deliver little. Sifting through
the fine print of their various "terms and conditions" is a
huge task. Many site owners and webmasters, may not have weeks to pore
through all the information offered them.
Regardless of how good any domain
hosting service may claim to be or how they represent themselves, the
only way you'll get to understand what they are offering is to ask
questions - and then to file the answers for comparison later on. Look
for user forums on their sites to get a vibe of how other clients are
finding the service.
Creating a template email to send out to domain hosting companies is
the most time efficient way to cut through the crap and get to the
gold solutions.
Asking Domain Hosts the right
questions
But what questions should you ask a
hosting service? A great deal depends on the type of web site you
have. For the purposes of this exercise, we'll use an example of a
typical Internet start-up who won't be looking for streaming-media or
hosting large files in the short term. Even if your site is only a
hobby web site, or community based - you never know when things may
change. Taming the Beast.net began as a hobby site in 1996 and only
served to assist my clients with driver links etc. - but all that
changed in 2000. Traffic grew from a few visitors a day to currently,
a few thousand....
Distance is no barrier on the
Internet.
The advent of the Internet has
compressed distance greatly. There is now no need to have your web
site hosted in the same country as you are - and actually it could be
very damaging to host domestically. An example I wrote about recently
was for a quote provided for the hosting of Taming the Beast.net and
associated interests. To have our sites hosted in Australia with a
very well known and respected local company would have cost me nearly
US$500 a month! We were paying around 10% of that price at the time by
hosting in the U.S.A - needless to say, the thought of switching never
crossed my mind!! We were getting all the benefits of an A grade
company for a fraction of the price!
To view my article on the current state of B2B services in Australia:
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles2
/australian-ecommerce-b2b.htm
Not all Aussie web hosts are involved in highway robbery, but the
overall picture a few months down the track in Australia is generally
unchanged. Many other countries fall into the same category. The best
web hosting deals in my opinion are still to be found in the United
States.
When in doubt - email!
The first step in tracking down the
best and most affordable web hosting company for your needs is to hit
your favorite search engine and visit web site hosting firms. Start
collecting email addresses of the various companies. Briefly look
around the site to see if their offer seems interesting. If their site
doesn't function correctly, best to move on. Take a look at the
company profile, if there isn't one that details the company (rather
than how good they claim to be), run like hell! The rest of your
initial enquiries can be handled via email.
Be straightforward when you send out your note to the hosting
services, let them know that you are shopping around. You can make
this clear by putting all the company addresses in the CC field of
your email. This solutions review strategy will quickly weed out the
companies who genuinely want your business and also allow you to
easily run through an initial cull. It will also save you valuable
hours in research.
Not all hosting solutions are created
equal
The criteria for the first cull is
simple - if they don't respond to your enquiry within 24 hours, delete
them from your contenders list. The same goes if they just send you
links to promo material without any personalized message text. To make
it more interesting, send your email late on a Saturday night -
wherever the hosting company is in the world, it will be the weekend.
The rationale behind the 24 hour deadline is this - if a web hosting
company can't respond with pre-sales questions quickly, it may be an
indication of what their customer support is like. Also, many web site
hosts don't see the "big picture" - which is a fatal
mistake. You may be starting out small, but who knows how big you'll
become and how many other people you will refer to their service? A
forward thinking company recognizes this and reacts appropriately.
Don't make it too hard on the hosting companies in your email to start
off with, you can ask more detailed questions as you reduce the list
of possibilities. The following is a template that you might like to
use.
The template email:
This example would be suitable for most
personal and business startups for initial enquiries. More complex and
technical points for consideration will be covered in the next article
in this series. Annotations are in brackets and accompany each
question.
==========================================
Dear Sales,
I am currently in the market for a good web hosting service with
excellent customer support and you are among a number of hosting
services I am reviewing. I have taken a quick look at what you have to
offer on your web site, but with so many services offering so many
different options - it can be pretty confusing. I would greatly
appreciate you answering a few questions and your recommendations for
a plan that would suit my purposes.
Here is a list of my basic current needs:
-
At least 50 meg of Hard Drive space
(Note: change this to suit)
-
At least 1 gig of Bandwidth per
month (Note: change this to suit. 1 gig is plenty for most to
start out with - BEWARE SERVICES OFFERING UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH -
discussed later in this article)
-
At least 20 email addresses
(Note: change this to suit)
- FrontPage 2002 Extensions (even if you don't use FrontPage,
handy to have)
-
PHP 4 (even if you don't need this
initially)
-
Perl 5 (for running scripts)
-
MySQL (database capabilities)
-
FTP access
-
Server logs access (for in-depth
web site traffic studies later on)
-
Web site traffic monitoring reports
-
Easy to use admin interface
(believe me, some web hosting control panels look like a dogs
breakfast!)
-
(Any other specific needs)
What would you recommend, bearing in
mind that I'll need plenty of room to grow. Please also send the URLs
of the suggested package and upgrade options pages. (Many of your
questions will be answered on these pages, links will save you from
having to hunt around on their sites)
Questions:
-
Is there a setup fee?
(A setup fee is not necessarily a terrible thing, it just needs to
be factored into your budget)
-
What is your uptime guarantee and
downtime compensation policy?
(Look for at least 99.5% uptime over a month with compensation
should it fall below that. If they aren't prepared to give you an
uptime guarantee or compensation statement - forget it. It means
that they don't have confidence in their equipment)
-
Can I upgrade my plan at any time?
(A good hosting service will allow you to change your plan at any
time without penalties)
-
What are your excess bandwidth
charges?
(Although unlikely you will get excess traffic during start-up
phase, it's important to know how much you will be charged if you
use over and above your quota for data transfer. Data transfer or
"bandwidth" refers to the amount of data going in and
out of your site e.g. publishing up information or requests from
visitors for information including page views.)
-
Is there a minimum contract?
(Some web hosts offer excellent prices, but when examining the
fine print you may discover that in order to get good prices you
must take out a contract for X months).
-
How often will my site be backed
up?
(In a number of cases, you'll find that the cheaper the price, the
less likely your site will be backed up on a regular basis)
-
Do you offer secure server and
ecommerce capabilities (shopping carts etc.) as an upgrade?
(You may not want this in the beginning, but it's handy to have)
-
Do you offer an affiliate program
or referrer bonuses?
(If you settle with a host and you are happy with the service, no
doubt you'll tell others. Why not profit from that - it can
subsidize the running of your site or even turn into a good earner
for you!)
-
Is your free tech support available
24 hours a day, 7 days a week? What is your average response time?
(A VERY important point - many offer this but sometimes all you'll
get is a recorded or autoresponder message during weekends and in
the early hours of the morning. Telephone support is not a
necessity - a good email support system is actually better than
the phone as it provides a record for both parties. I've noticed
that many helpdesk telephone support people have very little
technical knowledge - they tend to rely on "wizards".)
-
Just how large will my web site be
permitted to grow while being hosted by your company in terms of
hard drive space and data transfer.
(Some web site hosting services only want very small accounts -
start getting any serious traffic and they may ask you to leave)
Thank you for taking the time to answer
these questions.
Me.
==============================================
These questions and points are just to get you started in the reviews
process and will allow you to weed out many crooks and poorly
resourced solutiond. It may seem like a lot to ask, but an experienced
domain hosting services sales person should be able to complete the
questions within a couple of minutes. Always be polite when posing
questions as the answers will be provided by a human being with
feelings as well. By asking questions in a courteous manner, you will
get the relationship off to a good start.
When composing the email, skip a couple
of lines between each question to encourage the person responding to
put their remarks under the relevant question. This will give you a
good record to refer back to in the future. Always respond to each
response with a brief thank you note.
The Unlimited Bandwidth Banshee
A number of web site hosting companies
offer huge (or unlimited) bandwidth allowances at rock-bottom prices.
Be wary of such offers. All bandwidth has to be paid for by someone.
The fact is that most hosting services make the most profit from
small, bandwidth friendly (low traffic) sites. Some companies offering
huge data transfer quotas incorporate interesting "load
balancing" techniques once your site does start experiencing
heavy traffic flows. The end result is that if other web sites hosted
on the same server need resources, your web site loses them and your
site visitors may start experiencing massive slowdowns or other
mysterious happenings. This topic will be further explored in the next
article in this series.
Web site hosting is a strategic
partnership
If you receive incomplete responses,
curt remarks etc - no matter how good the offer may look on the web,
give it careful consideration. There would be nothing worse than to
open an account with a domain hosting service who really doesn't give
a damn about you. The sales process is where the company should be on
their best behavior!
In the next article we will delve a bit deeper into reviewing web
hosts and solutions before signing on the dotted line with some
further questions to ask and more technical/economic points to
consider.
Choosing the right web host is crucial to the success of your online
presence - it should be viewed as an important partnership/alliance
between both parties. The benefits to the hosting service are long
term, in the form of referrals from you and the purchasing of other
services offered by the company.
Who hosts Taming the Beast.net? Why?
And who do we trust the hosting of
Taming the Beast.net (and our clients) sites to? To view our
recommendation of the best web hosting solution around:
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/
admin/reghost.htm
Looking for free web space?
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/
articles/freewebspace.htm
Written by Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast.net
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
Tutorials, web content, tools and software
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