Choosing the Right Web Hosting Provider for Now and the Future

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You're starting a website and/or an online business on a shoestring, so you're going to go with the least expensive web host you can find, right? Wrong. Keep reading to find out why this could be the most expensive mistake you ever make.

Choosing the Right Web Hosting Provider for Now and the Future

When most people want to start an online business, they shop around online to see what web hosting businesses are available. A lot of them end up going with a "budget" service that only costs a few bucks a month. While this is all well and good, what exactly are you getting yourself into when you pick a host solely on price? If you are starting an Internet business or expanding your current business to the Internet, then this website is going to be very important to your business, and is going to need the ability to grow as your business does.

I can tell you from first hand experience that there is virtually a ton of "budget" web hosting companies out there. These companies offer you tons of disk space, and virtually unlimited bandwidth, at prices starting as ridiculously low as $0.99 a month. Yes, I’ve seen them for less than a dollar a month. At prices like that, you need to stop and ask yourself, how do they REALLY make money? Obviously, they count on sheer volume in order to turn a profit. But what if they have 2000 customers, each paying $1 a month? So they bring in $2000 a month. Do you think they can REALLY guarantee each user that huge pipe of bandwidth?

No. They certainly can not. That’s why a majority of these budget web hosts have a reputation for being slow. And even a modest website, without a ton of graphics, will still load slowly if the web server it is hosted on is serving slowly due to CPU or bandwidth issues.

This is vitally important to businesses on the Internet. With high-speed Internet access becoming ever more widespread, people are less apt to wait for a website to load. A slow web service provider can be considered the touch of death, and can take an excellent business idea and turn it into an abysmal flop.

But this only scratches the surface of the issues faced when finding the right host to serve your business.

Depending on the kind of business you are starting, there are different potential needs you may have, going forward.

For example, if you own a store and are trying to help attract customers, you might begin by creating an online showcase of your products. You might want nothing fancy, just something to entice people to either call to place an order on the phone, or even to come into your store. So a web host who provides the ability for HTML and images is all you need.

But what about when your business grows, or a lot of your customers express the desire to actually order their products online? Well, for starters, you’re going to need the ability to have a shopping cart system on your site. This can be a potential issue, as well.

There are many scripting languages available for websites. This being the case, I’m sure you can imagine that all of the shopping cart applications that have already been written are programmed in many different languages. So by paying attention to your web host's available scripting languages, you can ensure that when the time comes that you need a shopping cart (or any other kind of script), your host will be able to support it.

But shopping carts aren’t the only thing to worry about. If your site deals with audio or video (maybe you’re a professional DJ or videographer, and want to show samples of your work online), you might need the ability for the customers to hear a sample sound-clip, or to view a sample video. In this case, you are going to want to be able to stream audio and/or video from your site. Again, some hosts have this option within their hosting packages, and some don’t. If this is something that you might eventually need, it's smart to hook up with a host who offers it, right from the beginning.

Now that we’ve covered functionality, which is a REALLY good point, we come to another one: having room to grow.

Didn’t we just cover this? Didn’t we just talk about having the functionality we might need to expand down the road? The answer to this is yes and no. We DID talk about the web hosting provider having the features you need, but that’s not what I’m alluding to.

Picture this. You put up your website, do a little advertising, and it’s a complete hit. Customers flock to your site, and you find yourself upgrading your site with new functionality a few months later. With more functionality comes even more traffic. Next thing you know, your website starts to run super slow. There are just too many visitors to your site for your web hosting provider’s web server to handle.

So what are your options? Well, they are to either a) move to a web server with less customers on it (which might be a premium plan, if your web hosting provider offers it), or b) move to a dedicated server. The benefits of a web server with fewer websites running on it should be obvious. This should become more apparent when you understand that a single server supporting shared hosting accounts (which is the standard inexpensive hosting account) can have literally HUNDREDS of websites on it.

A dedicated server is just what it sounds like. It's a whole web server dedicated to only you and your company. Yes, this is more expensive, but by the time you need this level of service, it should more than pay for itself.

Absolutely not. We’ve talked about functionality. We’ve talked about having room to grow as your needs do. But there’s one vital element that we haven’t touched on yet, and it may be the most important of them all: available bandwidth.

It just makes sense, with all of the web hosting providers on the Internet, that some of them have faster connections to the Internet than others. This is the one thing that I am most critical about when looking for a web hosting provider. I always want to know how many connections to the Internet they have, and how fast they are. If I find a provider who has a T1 to the Internet and nothing else, I’m moving on to find something better. Good web hosting providers have more than one connection to the Internet. This is not only for speed purposes, but for back up; what if one of those connections fails? Its nice to know that there is some sort of redundancy built into your website’s availability.

So don't neglect to ask the question. What kind of connection does this provider have to the Internet? And does the provider have more than one? This should quickly help separate the fly-by-night hosting companies from the well-established ones.

And this, in turn, brings up yet another good point. How long has this web hosting provider been in business? Obviously, if you are building a website, you want for it to be around for awhile. Several years ago, I made the mistake of signing up with a relatively inexpensive hosting company. I didn’t check to see how long they were in business. I signed up, and paid a year in advance. Two months later, my website was gone. The company folded up and went out of business.

So why is it so important that you choose the best web hosting provider? Well, lets take a look, shall we?

Q: What if the web hosting provider doesn’t have the functionality I need?

A: You need to switch to a new web hosting provider.

Q: What if my site has become so big that I can no longer host it on a shared hosting account, but my web hosting provider has nothing better for me to move to?

A: You need to switch to a new web hosting provider.

Q: What if the web hosting provider you are hosted with cannot support the bandwidth you have grown to need?

A: You need to switch to a new web hosting provider.

If you don’t take these items into consideration when you are first selecting a web hosting provider, sooner or later you will have to move to a new provider. And between you and me, this is no picnic. I mean, let's put aside the complexity of moving the code and maybe even databases from one place to another, then any configurations that may be needed to actually make your site operate in the new location. Those can be hard enough, but the bigger problem you have is called DNS propagation.

What is DNS propagation? When your website is up and running in your new location, you need to tell all of the Domain Name Servers (DNS) in the world that your website can now be found at its new location. You do this by changing your site's DNS servers with your domain registrar. But once this is done, it can take up to 48 hours for this information to completely cycle through the Internet. In that timeframe, customers can potentially be hitting both websites, so you now have the nightmare of either a) having the old website say you are closed to business, or b) have the old website keep running as usual, and try to somehow sync up the two sites after DNS propagation is finished.

Doesn’t sound like fun, does it? It’s not. Making bad decisions on a web hosting provider, even though they won't impact you right away, may impact you in the future. What’s worse, if you are moving out of necessity, then the move is going to impact your bottom line, since your customers will not be able to successfully be able to use your site in its new location for up to 48 hours.

So the what’s the moral here? Spending a little time and research in the beginning can save customers, frustration, and money in the long run. Making an informed decision up front is the right way to go, and can be the difference between a successful online venture and a failed attempt.