Choosing The Wrong Web Hosting Plan Can Cost You Customers, Even
By Ian Clarence, Mon Dec 26th
Do you regularly buy goods online? Does this experience soundfamiliar.. you go to an e-commerce website, only to find, toyour annoyance, an excruciatingly slow response. You wait over 5minutes for the next page to load. In the end you give up, andnever make that purchase. Presumably many other people also giveup, causing the loss of many other purchases. Now imagine that you own that website, and run that onlinebusiness. You set everything up properly, but you find that manypeople face the situation described above. You lose customers,and eventually you lose your business, and all this principallybecause you chose the wrong web hosting plan. You see, when you set up any online business, I cannot over-stress the importance of choosing the right hosting company andplan.
In choosing a web hosting plan, you must decide whether to gofor shared or dedicated hosting. With a shared hosting plan,your website co-exists with other websites on a computer, knownas a server. With a dedicated hosting plan, your site, and yoursite alone resides upon just one server. You can get a goodshared hosting plan for under $10 per month, whereas dedicatedhosting plans can cost from $50 to over $100 a month. For shared hosting, one server handles the traffic (visitors)coming to all the websites it accommodates. So if your siteshares a server with other high-traffic sites, then it could runslow because the server works extra hard. Maybe the site willrun slow at peak times during the day, when you would expectmost customers to come and buy, causing the nightmare scenarioabove. However, hosting companies usually use many servers, withonly a limited number of sites on each, thus spreading the load.I therefore advise you to read reviews on hosting companies tosee whether people complain about sites slowing down due tooverloading. I will say more on reviews later. For dedicated hosting, your traffic does not compete withtraffic to any other web sites. However, this costs much more,so I do not recommend dedicated hosting unless absolutelynecessary. When choosing a hosting plan, you must consider bandwidth. I'llgive you a simple explanation of bandwidth. If your hosting planallows you 10GB of monthly bandwidth, it allows you 10GB(10,000MB) of data transfer from your site each month. If eachvisitor to your site accesses pages containing 300kB (0.3MB) ofdata on average, then your plan allows you 10,000 / 0.3 = 30,000visitors a month, or 1000 visitors a day. Ask yourself, do Ineed more than that? Imagine the scene: your site averages 2000 visitors a day. Twoweeks into the month, with your monthly bandwidth quota used up,your site "goes offline" until the beginning of next month,
oruntil you buy more bandwidth. How devastating for your business!Take my advice: get enough bandwidth before you start. Most importantly, you must know the effectiveness of yourhosting company's customer support. Many companies offer 24/7phone support, where you can ring them up any time day or nightwith a problem. But imagine this scenario: You created a database on your site for storing all yourcustomers' details. One day, the data gets corrupted, andeverybody accessing your site sees an error message. Trust me,it happens! You need an administrator to tweak the database attheir end. You must get this sorted out immediately but thehosting company gave you only an email address, so you send anemail. Then you could wait two days for a reply. Many companieswould actually email you back within the hour. However, acompany with 24/7 phone support allows you to talk directly to areal person. He or she could then keep you informed of thesituation as it progresses. Always look at the hosting company's "uptime guarantee". Manyguarantee 99% uptime for their servers, which sounds quite highat first, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1%of the time: over 7 hours out of each month! If you can, choosea host guaranteeing 99.7% uptime. When you decide upon a hosting company, always look at whatother people say about them. Go to Google.com and type the webhosting company name, and "reviews" or "testimonials". This willgive you a very rich list of sites where you can read otherpeoples' reviews, testimonials, reports, etc. so you can form aneducated opinion. A word of warning, you will always findsomeone who says something negative about even the best webhosting companies. So finally, before settling for a specific hosting plan andentrusting your precious online business to them, ask yourselfthese simple questions: * Do they provide 24/7 phone support, not just email support? * Does their bandwidth allow the number of visitors that youexpect? * Does the hosting plan enable your site to avoid going slow?What do the reviews say? What do the testimonials say? * What uptime do they guarantee? Would your business surviveyour site going down for the remaining percentage each month? * And can you find plenty of good reviews, and testimonials ofmany happy customers, and no too many complaints? If you can answer yes to all these questions, then go for it! Iwish you every success with your online business. About the author:Do you need a good, reliable but low cost web host? Ian Clarence has put together HostCream.com. Everybody says different things about web hosting, butHostCream.com regularly searches the internet for peoples' viewson the best web hosting package. =>Visit http://www.hostcream.com before you choose! |
