When you’re looking for a hosting partner, there are so many things to consider and so many tricks of the trade to be wary of. In this article, TPP Internet gives you a “heads up” on what to look out for when choosing your hosting provider.
Server Location
With the shift towards globalisation, many hosting providers are moving their servers overseas to cheaper areas in an effort to cut costs. However, this decision can seriously impact efficiency, reliability and security for you and your clients resulting in longer response times and increased frustration.
If your hosting provider’s servers are located in the USA, you will notice that visitors from Australia can often experience a noticeable delay when transferring data. Even in the realms of the World Wide Web where everything happens in the blink of an eye, Australia is only connected to the rest of the world by a few large undersea cables. So if you need to make frequent updates to your website or are often transferring multiple large files, the speed difference between a web host in Australia and a web host in a different country can be significant.
Something else to keep in mind is that having a hosting provider in the same country as you will save you a considerable amount of stress should something ever go wrong with the service. Instead of having to wait for assistance from a data centre all the way across the other side of the world, a hosting provider in Australia means that problems can be fixed in your own time zone, without the nuisance of long distance phone calls or language barriers.
Does your hosting provider offer an uptime guarantee?
Be wary of hosting companies who promise 100% uptime – sometimes they are talking about network uptime, which is slightly different and can be misleading.
Network uptime usually refers to the communications side of hosting – i.e. where and how the data is travelling across the Internet. Server uptime refers more to where the data is actually stored.
Basically, no server will ever be up 100% of the time. All servers, no matter which provider you host with, will need re-booting or server maintenance at some stage. You will find that most providers will offer an SLA of 95-99.95% uptime depending upon the package they are on.
What Spam Protection does your hosting provider have in place?
Spam is becoming more and more of an issue for all businesses – not only does it clog up inboxes every morning, it also eats into bandwidth usage which can be costly and cause services to slow down or even stop altogether.
For this reason, selecting a hosting provider with a high quality Spam filtering process is of the upmost importance.
A good hosting provider will have some sort of blacklist in place, which sits in front of their mail server. This means that whenever mail is sent to this server, it is run against a blacklist of IP addresses first, ensuring that any mail sent from a known Spammer is bounced straight back to where it came from before it even hits the hosting provider’s mail server. This then means that the host’s mail server is not slowed down by Spam and the customer’s inboxes are safe.
Many modern hosting providers will also employ “Bayesian” Spam filtration technology. This Spam filtration method performs a number of different tests on the contents and subject line of each mail message. As a result, each message scores a number of points. The higher the number, the more likely it is that the message is Spam. If a message is deemed as Spam, the email headers and subject line is changed to “SPAM.” This Spam filter is highly regarded because it can be trained on a “per user” basis – Individual users are allowed to control the Spam filters sensitivity themselves and decide what to do with the identified “SPAM” messages.
What support does your hosting provider offer?
Many hosting providers outsource their support overseas and while this saves considerable costs, it can often mean that the service level is compromised. The knowledge and ability of the entry level support team will be limited by restricted access to the server. Times zones can also be an issue with overseas support operations because even though most overseas call centres operate 24/7, escalation can sometimes take hours and even days, which is obviously not ideal in “high pressure” situations.
When you choose a hosting provider, make sure you choose one with a dedicated support team. Although most providers will do everything in their power to ensure your service is smooth and uninterrupted, there will always be instances where you need support. If you can contact your hosting provider in your time zone by phone or by email and know that your question is going to be answered efficiently by knowledgeable, friendly and technologically savvy staff, it is going to save you a lot of heart ache in the long run.
What does your hosting provider offer in the way of Bandwidth/Data Transfer?
Be wary of providers who offer unlimited or large amounts of bandwidth for next to nothing. The fact of the matter is that bandwidth costs money. If a provider is offering cheap bandwidth, they will need to make up for it somewhere else in order to stay profitable. This could have negative ramifications for you and your customers.
Another thing to keep in mind is that providers who offer large amounts of bandwidth will tend to attract users who use a lot of bandwidth. This can often take up a lot of the server’s resources, making your site slower. Is an unlimited amount of bandwidth/ data transfer really necessary for your site?
Happy Hosting…
Finding the right hosting provider for your needs means you’ll need to do your research. Be sure to weigh up the pros and cons of what the hosting provider is offering with what your business needs.
As a well established Domain Name Registrar, TPP Internet has been around the industry long enough to recognise the good, the bad and the ugly of the hosting world. For more information and assistance in choosing a hosting service that is right for you, please contact your TPP Internet Account Manager on 1300 665 491 or email partners@tppinternet.com
