Site Hosting Advice from Internet Marketing Experts

So you’ve built a user-friendly, well-designed website and have optimized for organic search engine rankings. Traffic is building and now you’re considering marketing campaign strategies and ideas to continue to grow your business, increase sales and attract more of your target audience to your site. But is your site host up to the challenge?

One of the most fundamental, yet often overlooked aspects of building and maintaining a website is the hosting provider. It is something that’s rarely re-considered over time; yet a poor choice can cause devastating effects on your site’s performance and your bottom line. What good is attracting an audience if you’re site can’t meet the increased demands?

So, to help you find a website host that can meet your current and future requirements, WebAdvantage.net’s own resident computer guru and web programming expert David Stansbury offers the following site hosting considerations:

• Dependability: Your site needs to be online! It should not crash; but if it does, the host needs to recover quickly and without losing your content or site pages.
• Speed: Websites need to be responsive and the web pages must load quickly. Slow response time or pages that take more than 4 or 5 seconds to load (DSL connection or better) can cause you to rapidly lose visitors and sales.
• Capacity: The hosting service should offer sufficient storage space to host your web pages, images, downloadable files, multimedia and more. Plan for the future - 2 GB may be enough space for your site today, but a growing e-commerce site may need 10 or 20 GB - or more - in just a few years!
• Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the amount of traffic and data transfer from your site. This includes web pages, pictures and design graphics, file downloads and multimedia presentations. Most site hosting companies sell a certain amount of bandwidth as part of their hosting packages. They may limit the amount of bandwidth you can use, or charge extra over a certain amount of usage. Be sure your hosting service offers enough bandwidth to meet your present and future requirements.
• Security: Your site should be secure against hacking, especially if you’re an ecommerce merchant. This is especially important if you plan to use programming technologies such as Perl, PHP, ASP, MySQL, etc. A good site host will keep their systems secured against hacker and virus attacks.
• Capability: If applicable, your site host should provide you with support for your chosen programming language or content management system (CMS). Examples include FrontPage extensions, ColdFusion, ASP, PHP, Perl and others. You may also need database support such as MS SQL or MySQL.
• Customer Service: A good site host will publish a 24-hour customer care phone number on their website. Even if it’s not toll-free, it should be answered promptly if you have a question. Call the number and see if they’re home! They should also list their physical address–not a P.O. drop box; and they should offer a contact or feedback form online.
• Accountability: They should offer you some sort of guarantee or refund if you are dissatisfied with their service.
• Longevity: Run a Whois inquiry on the host’s domain name. See how long their site has been online. Note the Whois contact information and see if the address matches the contact information posted on their website. Be wary of sites that use anonymous domain registry services to hide their contact information.
• Credibility: Run a web search on the company name and see how many hits you get. Check out any user reviews or comments you may find. You could also do a “link:” search on their URL to see how many other sites are linking to the site host and who those other sites are. Good reviews and relevant, quality sites linking to the site host may help give some feedback about the host.
• Convenience: The hosting service should include a customer login interface and the screen should be clean and uncluttered. You will need to log in to set up email accounts, databases, hosting options, etc. so the interface should be user-friendly.
• Value: That’s right, price should come dead last in your comparison. Most shared site hosting services should be affordable, but not so cheap as to be “too good to be true.” Shop and compare, but beware that sometimes you get what you pay for.

Good quality hosting is a vital investment in your business. It is worth taking the time to research a good host that will meet your specific requirements, now and for the future.

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David Stansbury is a Search Marketing Specialist with a professional background in web programming and computer systems administration. He is also a Microsoft Certified Professional and CompTIA A+ computer technician.

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