No small business start-up can afford to under-estimate the vital importance of a website. The effectiveness of an internet presence can make or break a new venture. Yet hosting, which helps guarantee the smooth running of the site, is frequently chosen simply on price. That could be a catastrophic mistake.
At its most basic, hosting might be described as just a bit of space on a big hard drive in a remote location. So if that’s the case, why don’t businesses save the money and host their website themselves?
Well first, there’s the maintenance issue. A website should be available 365 days of the year, 24 hours a day. If something goes wrong with the hard drive that holds the website data, or the main computer, the connection to the internet, or even the electricity supply, that site will disappear until the breakdown is resolved.
Next, there is security. We are all aware of hackers. If a company hosts its own site, it has to be prepared for attacks at any time, and skilled enough to defeat them. Finally, there are software issues. Your computer may run fine on its own, but what happens when you connect it to the rest of the internet?
Most companies can’t afford to have a hardware expert, a software engineer and an internet guru available all day and night, so for a few dollars a month you pay a hosting company – and leave those problems to someone else!
In reality, of course, your hosting company provides much more than disk space. At the very least, it should provide redundant storage and file backups. In other words, your website won’t be stored on just one drive but two (or more), so if one fails, another takes over in a fraction of a second. Nobody would ever know there was a problem.
A good hosting provider doesn’t stop at just maintaining the availability of your website. They will also provide you with email services and more besides. You may not initially need all that is offered, but you need to look to the future. While it is not prohibitively difficult to change hosting, it is obviously better if you don’t need to.
So as your company grows, it might want to take advantage of MySQL databases (which are used by things like shopping carts), extra FTP accounts, multiple domain names, subdomains, blog software, cron jobs or any number of other options that good hosts include in your plan. You may not know what half those things mean right now, but you will be surprised how soon one or more of them becomes important to your website!
As you may now realize, hosting is quite a complex subject, and it is perhaps unfair to expect most small business owners to know all the ins and outs. However, if that’s the case, how can you make an informed decision about which company to choose?
The key is flexibility. It’s easy for a company to say it gives you 50 gigabytes of server space, which is almost certainly enough to start with, but what about bandwidth? Server space is the amount of storage your site uses, but bandwidth is at least as important, if not more so. Bandwidth can be seen as your site’s capacity to handle visitors. The more people visit, the more bandwidth is used. Many hosts now offer unmetered bandwidth, but check the fair-use limits.
An important issue here is what happens if you exceed those allowances. It’s surprisingly easy to do, particularly if your marketing efforts create a sudden traffic spike. Some budget hosts will simply cut you off until you pay for an upgrade. A good host will absorb any short-term excess and contact you to discuss the best way forward.
You should also be able to rely on your host for a degree of technical support. Even quite experienced web users run into situations from time to time where they lack knowledge. At times like these it’s good to have a well-staffed ticket system, or interactive online support, to help you resolve any issues as quickly as possible.
As a new business start-up you probably won’t need things like virtual or dedicated servers for a while, but it’s worth finding out if your potential host provides an easy upgrade path.
There are hundreds of different hosting companies online with a mind-boggling number of options. The easy choice for small business owners is to pick the cheapest. However, when you consider the importance of the decision it is worth taking a bit more time and finding the correct solution at the start. If you aren’t sure about anything, try asking the hosting company you are considering selecting. If they are capable, and want your business, they will find you the answers!