Often, who hosts your website is the decision given the least amount of thought. Quite often, cheapest wins. Unfortunately, this trend often leads you down the path of client phone calls saying ’hey, did you know your website is down ?’ and lengthy phone calls on hold to a support company somewhere overseas that shows about as much interest in resolving your problem as a teenager’s desire to look up from their smartphone.
The Digital Embassy provides hosting services in a range of packages customised to a client’s specific requirements to ensure our sites are running at their optimal performance.
When choosing a hosting package and supplier, consider these important criteria:
Where is the physical location of the host server and more importantly, where is the company’s data centre located?
Speaking to someone in the same or at least similar time zone can mean quicker response times and resolutions within business hours. For some clients (including government), keeping data locally or within the country can also be an important factor to consider.
What kind of support does your host company offer?
Should anything go wrong during, or outside of business hours, how will this be handled and will someone be available to render assistance ? What are the quoted response times and do they offer any up-time guarantees?
What backup plans are in place for your data?
Your site should be at least backed up in a couple of locations separate to where your actual site server resides. If the company burns to the ground, does your website go down with them ? In the best case scenario, your site should be mirrored on a different server so if the initial one goes down for whatever reason, the mirror kicks in and the user is none-the-wiser.
Do you have sufficient bandwidth and storage space available?
This ensures quick uploads and that any additions you make to your site (new pages and imagery) does not adversely affect load times or overall site performance.
Where are your customers located compared to where you are hosted?
If you have customers all over the globe, you may want to consider paying a little extra to get your site cached across multiple servers around the world to ensure quick load times based on location.
Reliability
Hosting companies come and go. Choose one that has been around for a while and seems stable. If they go bust, so does your website. Do you have a backup of your own site stored with you ?
Hosting doesn’t have to be a tough decision but probably needs a little more forethought than many people actually give it. Consider your options and talk to us at The Digital Embassy about the options before locking yourself into a fly-by-nighter because they were ‘cheaper than the others’. As with anything in life, you get what you pay for.
