Nov 25
At some stage in your journey to find a good host you will look at hosting overseas. Now there are a million different reasons for and against hosting abroad but the main one is usually price. One of the favourite places to host (if your not from there) is the USA. This is mainly because of the good exchange rates we get here in the UK which at the time of writing is around 65c per £1. The thing about hosting in America compared to here is its not link you are outsourcing to a third world country as in many ways America is the birth place of the internet and hence web hosting. Also many of the world’s top web-hosting companies are based in the USA, many hosting over a million customers, you would struggle to find a host of this size in the UK.
Another thing that people may be concerned about is the time difference as far as support goes. In the east cost of the US the time difference is not that big, around 5 hours. However this still is not really a factor with the bigger business hosts as they offer 24 hour support. Also the great thing about America is there really is no language barrier to speak off. This however could be an issue if you choose to host in some of the other big hosting countries like India although it does depend on the type if company you choose. At the same time you may be concerned that your host in the US (or even here for that matter) could be outsourcing their support somewhere else like India too. If this is the case i would definitely not recommend going with them. Not necessarily because Indian support is bad but i just don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have onsite support, its never as good no matter what people may claim.
I think theres also alot to be said for going with the bigger hosting companies in general as they have alot more to lose if things go wrong. With this in mind they are likely to put more into keeping their infrastructure up and running 24-7 as any outage is potentially going to affect thousands of customers. You also have to think about their track record and length of time in the business, some of these larger American business hosts have been in business for 10 years or more. I can tell you any internet business thats been going that long has to know what they are doing and how to keep customers happy!
As you can see i am a fan of offshore hosting for your business in general but it is the same as all things you have to look beyond the sales page of any business and work out if they are what they say. I know this can be hard in today’s market with everyone promising the earth. However i think there are a few points you can check automatically:
- How long have they been in business?
- Do they have an uptime guarantee?
- Lots of small print
- Do people talk about them on the web forums? Good or Bad?
So as promised that is my view on overseas hosting. More to come soon!
Tagged with: business • guarantee • hosting • Offshore • Support • USA
Nov 24
So i get this question alot and i suppose its because there are so many different web-hosts to choose from to it can be very hard to make a decision on which host is best for you. Obviously one factor that everyone thinks about is the price. This however should never be the deciding factor when you are purchasing web hosting, mainly because so much can rest upon your website being active and accessible. This is no more true than if you are running a ecommerce site as even an hours downtime could result in 100s of pounds worth in lost sales and sometimes angry customers.
Another decision that you are going to have to work out when deciding which web host is best for your business is if you want dedicated/managed or shared hosting. It may seem confusing if you have never heard the distinctions before but it is very important that you understand the differences.
- Dedicated hosting means that the server (computer) your website is running on has only your site running on it. This means that there wont be any other sites that you have to share your bandwidth with. This hosting is only used for very large sites that get 1000s of visitors per day. Also with dedicated hosting you may need to know how to manage the server or employ someone who will do it for you.
- Managed hosting means that you may or may not be sharing the server with other websites, however the host will be managed by the hosting company for you (unlike dedicated). The main advantage of this option is that it is cheaper than dedicated and you don’t have to worry about the settings and general running of the server
- Shared hosting is the cheapest of the bunch and sometimes looked down upon by internet nerds like myself! However hosting is all relative and theres no point in paying for dedicated hosting if you don’t need it. As you can guess shared means you are sharing with other websites on the server. However aslong as the server is setup/managed correctly then the other websites should not be able to affect yours. Shared hosting can also be really cheap as low as £5 per month and is often ideal for small or startup businesses.
As you can see there are a few different options when it comes to hosting. Theres actually a lot more options if i am honest but i don’t want to overwhelm you too soon. The main thing to remember is that you can always upgrade your hosting package as you need it. So if your site does become very popular overnight you can usually ask your host to bump you up to a higher plan as required. There may be a little down time as they switch your plans but it think that is a small price to pay for scalability.
As a side note you may also want to consider what features your web-host comes preinstalled with. I don’t just mean the scripting language (ill talk about that later) but the many free scripts that are now available. I will give you and great example, this blog runs on a program called Wordpress. Now this software is free and allows me to post all my blog entries and content here with no web design knowledge at all! The great thing was that because my hostgator has a wordpress install from the cpanel i was able to setup this site in about 5 minutes. It was really a case of two forms that i had to fill out and i had a new blog that was ready to go.
So hopefully i didn’t get too off track there but hopefully you have a little more knowledge about the hosting world than you did when you started reading!
Tagged with: business • Dedicated • host • Managed • Shared • web • wordpress
Nov 21
Just a quick post to say there will be some great info to come soon so stay with me
