Web Hosting Introduction Part 3: Finding the Right Host

When you understand how web hosting works and what you will be using to get your own website on the net, you run into one of your most significant tasks: choosing a web host. Instead of pitching Site5’s service to you as the end-all, perfect service, it is important to understand what you should look for in any hosting provider. When selecting a plan from the thousands of available options, the biggest concerns you should have are “Will this company help me if I need it?”, “Will the service (and space) be good enough for me to not need help?”, and “Will the host keep up with the technology changes in the industry?” These three questions are very basic and intuitive, but finding a company to consistently say, “Yes!” to both is not an easy task.

Making the Right Investment

As with most other service-related industries, new customers need to be assured that they are making a good investment, and they need to know that they can try the service risk-free for a certain period of time to ensure they made the correct decision. A common guarantee to assuage those fears is the “Your satisfaction is guaranteed with a 30-day money-back guarantee.” These guarantees hold the host accountable to ensuring that you are 100% satisfied with the decision you made in choosing their service since you have many options in choosing a “home” for your website.

The Ups and Downs of Uptime

In addition to a money-back guarantee, hosts will also advertise an uptime guarantee to pledge that your site will be up and accessible whenever you need it. A 99.9% uptime guarantee would suggest that your site will be up and running virtually every time it needs to be accessed. This guarantee is a necessity both because well-maintained servers are very dependable and should be online as close to 100% of the time as possible and because you cannot afford to have the site down. Imagine you invented the season’s most popular gift and thousands of people flock to your website every day to buy the gift directly from you. If your website is ever down, not only are you losing business for that short period of time, you are also appearing unprofessional to those prospective customers (which is likely more damaging than the lack of business). Clearly you trust your hosting provider with your site, and they are responsible for your site’s availability and performance, so the uptime and performance guarantees provide a basic peace of mind in making your decision.

It is important to understand that the idea of a full 100% uptime guarantee, while nearly impossible, may not be a great thing because downtime is often necessary when hosts make hardware and software upgrades on your server. If your server is never taken offline, you may worry about your host’s commitment to keeping you (and your site) up to date with the fastest and most secure systems.

Who You Gonna Call?

GHOST BUSTERS!! (Sorry, I had to…) After you understand a host’s guarantees, it is important to note the host’s availability in case you run into problems. The industry standard is to provide 24×7 technical support. This standard is a necessity with the understanding that people could be accessing your site from anywhere in the world at a given time, and you should be able to work on your site with immediate response at any time. Technical support comes in many forms: email ticketing systems, live chat with a support representative, and phone support.

While you would assume “the more the merrier” with regard to available avenues for technical support, Site5 has found email support as the most effective means of solving technical problems. Commonly, hosts will advertise the availability of live chats with technical support representatives (also known as system administraors) or phone support, but the nature of many website and server-related problems are easiest to solve when you (as the customer) can fully explain your situation and the representative can address the complete problem.

This finding is counterintuitive: you would imagine immediate responses to your questions in the form of live chat or phone support would get you an answer quicker, but we found that support representatives can be overrun with several requests at the same time. In these instances, the rep’s responses may not fully solve the problem (if he/she even knows how to solve the problem). Complicated site problems and complex problems (which require the “sysadmin” to track down the root cause of a problem in order to solve a continual problem) can take as long as an hour, but the nature of live chat and phone support require that the rep get you an answer quickly and give you the impression that the problem is solved upon concluding the chat or phone call. Because the availability of these two options led to a poorer quality of customer service in our experience, Site5 removed those avenues with the commitment to immediately and fully address problems within thirty minutes via email. This practice allows the support representative a little more time to make sure problems are fixed while allowing time to investigate each individual problem more carefully if necessary.

Who’s Helping You?

In-house Sales/Billing/Support teams have (unfortunately) become a lost characteristic in the web hosting realm. In order to keep up with all of the requests that are generated by hundreds of servers worth of clients, several larger web hosts farm their sales, support, and billing teams to call centers or to other companies. This practice is not surprising when you consider that many hosting companies offer phone support and live chat support which both require a significant amount of manpower to maintain… You are more likely to get a quicker response, but you are less likely to get a quality response.

Sitting at the Trendy Table

No one likes the buyer’s remorse feeling when the rose-colored glasses are taken off and reality hits like a ton of bricks. The internet is constantly changing and evolving, and if your web host is not dynamic and flexible, you could find yourself frustrated with static resources. Becoming a web host is as simple as buying a reseller plan, but becoming a good web host requires an uncommon measure of control and experience. Cookie-cutter control panels, confusing account management systems, and outdated hardware can be dangerous for customers. Site5 is one of a handful (if that many) web hosts with an Engineering team dedicated to ensuring that our customers always have the latest and greatest that the web hosting world has to offer. Obviously, it is not necessary to look for a host with a team dedicated to addressing system-wide developments, repairs, improvements, and replacements, but you certainly want to make sure your host has the ability to control and fix everything it is offering. For example, if there is a security hole in the cookie-cutter control panel you are given by your host, it is important that the host can patch that hole or at least provide the necessary fix as soon as it is available or you run the risk of someone hacking your site (which can be as gruesome to your site as it sounds).

Nota Bene (Latin for “mark well,” so pay attention…)

Now all of those cynics out there just thinking I am peddling Site5’s service under the guise of a helpful post about choosing a good web host, I do concede that there is quite a bit of overlap between “a good host” and Site5… The company’s guarantees are very similar to the characteristics of a good host (not much of a coincidence, since we are trying to be a great host). The Site5 team is committed to being at the top of the web hosting industry, and we honor this commitment by remaining accountable to the basics of “What Makes a Good Host.”

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See what I did there… Tied the title into the end of the post… As Kevin Nealon’s character said in Happy Gilmore, “It’s circular. It’s like a carousel. You pay the quarter, you get on the horse. It goes up and down and around. Circular. Circle. With the music. The flow… all good things.”