Five Web Hosting Tips for Small Business
by Stuart Livesey
Every small business that has a site out there on the Net needs good web hosting. Sadly there are plenty of web hosts who promise the earth and deliver very little while there are others who offer a second rate service but camouflage it with a lot of spin.
So to help you choose a web host that is right for your small business here are 5 web hosting tips from our many years experience on the Net.
1. You get what you pay for. If all you want to pay is $5.00 a month then don’t expect an instant response if a problem arises.
2. Don’t settle for anything less than 24/7 email support. It’s a known fact that servers always crash at 3am on a Sunday morning and when it happens you want to be able to contact someone fast!. (We’ve seen hosts offering support via their message board - that’s just not good enough for any serious web host)
3. Don’t be fooled by anyone who tries to offer you 100% up time. It is simply impossible to guarantee anything like that at all.
4. Understand what 99% up time really means. There are 8,760 hours in every year; 99% of that is 8672.4 hours. That means you should expect your server to be down a total of 87.6 hours in any year so don’t be surprised if your server hiccups now and again.
5. Keep a mirror image of all the content that’s on your website on your office PC and back those files up to a CD at least every week. Also get your host to back up your sites every 24 hours with a retention period for those files of at least 24 hours.
