User Guides > Choosing a Web Hosting Company
Choosing a web hosting company is important because the quality of the hosting service has a direct effect on how reliable and secure your website is. This in turn will influence how your clients percieve your organisation. Before choosing a hosting company it is important that you ask the right questions. We have put together some questions you can ask a potential hosting company to help you to make an informed decision.
1. Do you have redundant high speed connections?
Even the best technology will occasionally fail. To your clients, however, this is unacceptable, so it is important that on these rare occasions visitors to your site are unaware of technical problems. To provide an uninterrupted service your hosting provider should have more than one high speed connection to the Internet "backbone". This alternative "redundant connection" will continue to provide Web services for your visitors in the event that your primary connection fails.
2. What control do I have over my website or server?
Often you may want to update or make changes to the content of your site. You should be aware of any restrictions or limitations imposed on you by your hosting provider in this respect. Some hosting providers may not allow you to use more powerful features of some programming/scripting languages for security reasons. If you need a website that uses technologies such as ColdFusion, ASP, CGI scripting or database integration you may find these restrictions will prevent this.
3. How secure is my server?
Your Web pages should be hosted on a server that is physically secure. Not only should your server be physically secure but it should also be impenetrable to hackers. Hackers are extremely resourceful and ingenius people who can gain access to a server which has not been properly configured and kept current with security updates. Your hosting company should have a proven track record of preventing unauthorised access. For E-commerce transactions such as online credit card processing, your webserver must have a valid secure server certificate to enable encryption of all sensitive data while in transmission and give your visitors the confidence to transact business on your site.
4. Will my site scale?
The term scalability referes to the ability of your website/server to cope under increased demand. When the number of visitors to your website increases, will the site still perform satisfactorily or will it slow to a crawl? Your hosting provider should have plans in place to deal with increased demand. After all, increased demand is what you want.
5. Is my website regularly backed up?
It is especially important that any e-commerce functionality and your database is backed up regularly. In a worst case scenario, if your web server fails and there is no backup, you may lose thousands of pounds in orders that you cannot recover. The first indication of this will be when your customers begin to complain about unfullfilled orders. The frequency of your backups will depend on the activity and the nature of your site, in some extreme cases it may be neccessary to backup your database as often as every 15 minutes.
6. Is my website monitored round the clock?
The Internet is busy 24 hours a day and while your working day may have ended, for international customers the working day may have just begun. Your website must be monitored throughout the day to ensure that it is available and performing well. If your site is not constantly monitored it could be down without your knowledege, leading to lost sales, or worse, customers using your competiton instead.
7. How do I know how many visitors my site is getting?
The only way to judge the success of your website is by the amount of visitor traffic it receives. Your web host should provide you with regular access to traffic reports. Without these reports it will be difficult to judge the success or failure of the site. Some statistics can be misleading so it is important to interpret these reports correctly. The number of Hits, Page Impressions, or Unique Visitors are just three of the various confusing ways of quantifying website traffic. Without knowing what is being measured, you cannot know how well your site is doing.
8. Is there 24 hour technical support? Your website will be open to the public worldwide across different time zones 24 hours a day. It is important that no matter what time of day, a member of technical support can be easily contacted an technical issues can be resolved promptly.
