The Value of Proper Hosting
October 3rd, 2008
If you are at all serious about your site, you need proper hosting. This could be a “you get what you pay for” conversation, but I think it’s more important to discuss the hidden factors, which many non-web professionals are likely unaware of.
Let’s start with the basics. What is web hosting? Web hosting is a service, which provides you with disk space and a network connection on a web server on which to serve your site to the masses over the Internet. Most web hosting packages consist of space to store your website (including a database), as well as email service. Right off the bat you should be realizing that your choice of hosting providers influences two essential components of your business — your website and your email.
The obvious side effects of a poor hosting provider are that your website or your email could be inaccessible more often than with a good provider, but you don’t need me to tell you that. What I’m going to talk about today are the less obvious side effects that you’re not likely to think about.
- Poor hosting makes life miserable for your web developer. It really does and you should care that your web developer is miserable because a happy web developer is more likely to do the little stuff for free, or at discount, because it’s painless for them. When they’re miserable, I can assure you, it will take longer to do things, and they will be sure to bill you for every last second of their misery. To be clear, it doesn’t take longer simply because they aren’t happy, the reality is that with lower tier hosting providers, pages load more slowly, websites require more tuning, and it just generally takes longer to complete routine tasks.
- Poor hosting makes your customer miserable. We’ve all been to websites that are slow, or riddled with errors, and we know what it does to us — it sends us packing to another site! In a world where we’ve all become accustomed to instant access to information, your customers aren’t going to wait around for your lousy web hosting to serve your site. Amazon.com for example noticed that for every 100 millisecond increase in page load time they would lose 1% in sales (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007).
- Poor hosting companies tend to have equally poor support. This means that when your site does go down (as it’s more inclined to do on a poor host), it’s going to stay down longer because the support team usually smaller and over capacity dealing with a greater volume of issues/complaints.
I could go on and on, but I think you’re getting the picture. Pay a few extra bucks a month for proper hosting and reap the rewards ten fold. We tend to recommend Media Temple to our clients, but ask your web developer who they recommend, and take their advice to heart.
