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Hosting is more important than you think
Written by Tyme White on April 25, 2008
If your site is a hobby I understand completely if you cut corners (to save money?) on hosting. However, if you are serious about your site (to the point you want to aggregate your content), hosting is important.
Uptime is important.
If you are with a host that has a reputation of having bad uptime, why would you host with them? There are free alternatives (or almost free as in extremely inexpensive) that provide excellent uptime. The excuse of not being able to afford hosting isn’t as strong as it once was. A person has a choice and often when taking short cuts, we get exactly what we deserve.
Back to hosting, we need the RSS feeds to be available 99.9% of the time, which is the standard for hosting. Of course there will be times when a host doesn’t make the 99.9% guarantee because things happen.
But they shouldn’t miss it every month or every other month…see what I’m saying?
What do you look for when looking for a host?
- Features (bandwidth, email, control panel, etc.) are important but take a moment to see what you need in regards to hosting and find a hosting plan that matches your needs.
- Support is very important. If you encounter a problem, how long does it take to be resolved? Of course, this is contingent on getting all the information from the customer on their first request otherwise the result can be email tag. If phone support is important to you, consider that as well.
- How often do they update their software? If you want to use scripts that require php5 and your host is still using php4 that can cause a problem.
- Software settings (and installed modules) are important as well. Do not assume that a host has the software settings or modules you need.
There are many different aspects to finding a host but I hear a lot that uptime isn’t important. Your site needs to be up and accessible for people to read your content.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
I agree. Everyone always recommends hosts with the lowest price or the most features, but really all I care about (and am willing to pay top-dollar for) is the fact that my site will be up when I need to be, and has a good support system.
Storage/bandwidth are almost a nonissue these days though because you can use Amazon S3 or similar services for hosting large files or videos or whatever.
Uptime, speed and support have always been the things I value the most, and I’ve always been willing to pay a premium for those things, even if they don’t necessarily give you gobs of bandwidth or a prettier control panel.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
100% uptime is a bit of a fallacy, what really counts is how reliable a service is and how fast the host reacts to issues or requests for support.
And it’s the latter two that seem to trip people up every time if they choose on price alone.
April 26th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Actually, it’s not a fallacy, particularly since I’ve maintained it on my servers for years (but I also spend the money to make sure my servers are properly maintained - I get what I pay for). That 1% of downtime equals 9 hours of downtime a year - which is a lot on a properly maintained server.
Those uptime guarantees do not include data center outages but honestly, if a site is down 45 minutes a month, that’s not a properly maintained server.
However hosts have gotten silly with the guarantees like 99.99%, 99.999% - those are unrealistic. 99.9% is not.
April 26th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
> However hosts have gotten silly with the guarantees like 99.99%, 99.999% - those are unrealistic. 99.9% is not.
Quite. You do get, to an extent, what you pay for. And when hosts start claiming issue x, or ‘regular outage’ y don’t count, it renders the whole thing moot.
And that is why, Tyme, I said 100% uptime (which is what folks who claim 99.99999% and so on) is just a sales hook.
April 27th, 2008 at 5:04 am
Actually I received a couple of emails stating 99.9% (rounding up to 100%) was unrealistic. Just in case you meant the same thing (which I would understand if you did - just as those people did since I didn’t mention 100% in my article) I made the comment, knocking out two birds with one stone and explaining it a bit better.
(For others): if you’re wondering if your host is okay (please do not email me asking that…thanks, appreciate it!), there are many free monitoring services that will give you an idea of your site’s uptime. The smaller the checking frequency the more accuracy you’ll receive.
April 28th, 2008 at 2:46 am
I have a host now, although I only still redirect and he owes me 20 bucks and doesn’t return my calls LOL. But these are good pointers that I have to look into and use to decide what I want precisely - from him or someone else.