The hosting of your website is often the most overlooked part of the website marketing campaign. While many consider hosting to be more a utility expense than a marketing expense, how and where your site is hosted can play a significant role in the success or failure of your marketing campaign. Over the years I've used almost a dozen different web hosts providers. In that time, I've found only one or two which were virtually hassle-free, and for that I had to pay some pretty sizeable hosting fees. Web hosting costs have reduced drastically in the last several years; however, you shouldn't choose a web host based solely on cost. As inexpensive as it might be month to month, a poor provider can cost you thousands of dollars in lost sales if your site or email goes down or simple fails to function properly on a consistent basis. When researching various hosting companies, look for quality over cost. You don't necessarily have to pay an outrageous monthly fee, but you do need to find a host that provides you all the features you need with minimal inconveniences and ongoing problems. Tech Support A good web hosting company will provide around the clock call-in tech support. Personally, I avoid any provider that only offers email or online tech support. That's a personal thing for me; you'll have to make your own judgment on that. If you call, you should not be left on hold for more than four or five minutes before reaching a representative to help you. If you email a tech support issue, be sure your provider responds to requests quickly'-within hours, not days'-and is able to quickly and competently provide you a solution. Down Time Many providers offer some kind of uptime guarantee. Be sure to read the small print in order to fully understand what that means. I've dealt with providers which the guarantee was only for the website and not for email. I went a full day without functioning email and the host refused to give me any discount on that month's service charges. Many providers give a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This means that the provider guarantees that their servers will not go down for more than 8 hours per year or less than 45 minutes each month. Of course, if you're in the middle of a big marketing campaign, 45 minutes can be crucial. If a provider fails to meet their guaranteed up time, you can usually get your hosting charges waived for the month. If it happens regularly, you can literally go months without having to pay fees. Sounds nice, but it's really not adequate compensation for the amount of traffic, and perhaps business, you lose while your website or email is not functioning as it should. If you are currently with a host that goes down more than a couple times a year, you may want to reconsider who you host your website with. Server Load Monitoring You want to choose your hosting plan carefully to ensure that it will be able to handle whatever server load your site might generate, especially during peak times or big marketing pushes. Most web hosts allocate a certain amount of bandwidth usage each month. If you exceed that, you may find yourself paying extra fees, or worse, your site may be inaccessible until you ante up more money. Be sure to know your bandwidth usage and how much you are allocated. Knowing that, you'll also want to be aware of the consequences if you exceed that bandwidth. Plan for this to happen in advance so you're not caught off guard when you get a sudden surge of traffic. Secure Server If you are processing credit card information or storing personal data that should not be exposed, it is important that you have access to a secure server. Security is a growing concern with Internet shoppers and many businesses report an increase in conversions just by displaying a secure symbol in their shopping cart area. Some web hosts will provide you access to a secure portion of their server. In these cases when visitors navigate to the secure area, the URL will actually change and the visitor will no longer be 'on' your site (i.e. www.yourdomain.com). In most cases the user probably won't even notice, however many websites place their entire online store on these external secure areas. The downside to this is that it removes many potentially valuable pages off your site making any potential search engine ranking benefit inaccessible to you. Each of these pages could otherwise be an entry point to your site via the search engines. The other option is to have a secure area on your own site. You can do this by purchasing a secure certificate for your domain name. This certificate is then 'installed' through your web host giving you unlimited secure areas of your site to work with'all on your own domain. This is the most professional solution and allows you to keep potential search engine friendly pages indexable with the rest of your site. I would also recommend keeping as much of your website out of the secure area as possible and only transfer visitors to the secure area when they are in the checkout process. If they leave the checkout to continue shopping they should also leave the secure area. Free Hosting Services Free web hosting services, such as Geocities, are not recommended for any business that wants to develop a professional online presence. Leave those free services for hobby and personal sites. If you want your business to thrive on the Internet you need to be able to direct someone to www.yourwebsite.com, not www.geocities.com/~mycoolsite/index.html. In-House Hosting Many companies are bypassing the web hosting providers altogether in favor of hosting their sites on their own in-house servers. There are some definite pros for doing this but I don't recommend going this route unless you have a full-time IT person on staff who is skilled at web server management. I once flirted with hosting my site in-house. I have a rented in-house file server which comes with ongoing customer support. My tech sold me on the benefits of hosting my site in-house. After moving my site over I quickly realized that there was much more to web hosting than meets the eye. Days went by as I waited for my server tech to set-up proper email functionality and domain redirecting. After about a week with calls to the domain registrar, server tech, and programmer, all saying the problem is somebody else's issue, I return to using a real hosting provider. In-house hosting also raises site access issues. When hosting in-house the ability for visitors to access and download your site is largely dependant on your local ISP and the connection speed you receive. Even with broadband DSL or cable, typical connection speeds are much slower than can be provided with a quality web host. This can increase download times and create a more sluggish site if you have many visitors at once. In-house hosting also does not provide you with any kind of uptime guarantee, and in my experience, excellent tech support. Should your server go down, you temporarily lose Internet access, or power goes out, your website will be unavailable to your visitors. In my experience, quality web hosting is difficult to come by, but is absolutely essential for any business that takes their online marketing efforts seriously. Be sure to research your potential web host providers carefully. Find out what services they provide for free and what you have to pay for. Make sure they provide sufficient tech support, guaranteed uptime, as well as a good reputation from others. If you need to, be willing to pay more for quality service. A little extra each month can help eliminate thousands of dollars in potential lost revenue if your website or email goes down at an inopportune time. |
