security posted in security  on 28 August 2009
by Andrew Lang 
View by Categories | View By Latest

Questions you should ask your hosting company

Hosting is an important aspect of your online business. It's often an afterthought for many people, with the assumption being that there's no real difference between the various hosting companies, unless one has a particularly bad reputation.

We have invested a lot of time and effort into hosting our own websites (purchasing our 5th dedicated server just a few days ago), because it's the backbone of our business. It ensures our sites are reliably hosted, backed-up daily, avoid "bad neighbourhoods", and have been able to track new technologies because we are able to install any server-side component on our servers. Only with reliable hosting, can you begin to then tackle all the other aspects of website development.

Conversely, there are often numerous problems with shared hosting, primarily because shared hosting normally results in your website being hosted on the same server as literally thousands of other websites. That's not great because:-
  • The more sites you're sharing a server with, the more likely the possibility your website will belong to a "bad neighbourhood", if your site is sharing the same IP address as sites banned by Google, sites hosting viruses and malware, sites promoting content that may be illegal.
  • Bad programming practises on other sites you're sharing a server with which result in poor hosting performance and downtime.
  • No automated regular backup of your data
  • Limitations on what your website developer can do with your site
You can check on yougetsignal.com here as to how many sites your website is sharing a server with.

There's also the disconnection between your website developer and the host, as inevitably they're not the same company. We've been there before when we used 3rd party, shared hosting (many years ago). Our clients would complain their site is responding slowly, or even down. We'd contact our hosting company, and eventually the issue gets resolved. Or it doesn't, and just repeats over and over. In other words, the website developer has no real control over the hosting. They're hoping the above bullet points won't happen. Hoping it won't happen is not enough.

Also from a developer perspective, getting hands-on experience with a server teaches you much about what impact your code has on the server. Since I purchased our first server back in 2006, I have learnt much about hosting, and also many new things about programming. For example, the CPU "footprint" a website can leave when it takes on a spike of traffic (e.g. when a website becomes popular from a Digg or Reddit submission). This took me onto caching and other techniques to reduce the footprint. In turn this lead to even better performance of page loads generally. Getting direct access to the server also lead to the automatic patching service for all websites running our template, and installation of many useful server-side components not available on shared hosting.

Does your website developer use such dedicated servers? Or are they simply FTPing files to a shared host? A professional website developer will either have their own servers, or at the very least be hiring a managed dedicated service (where a 3rd party comapny take care of hosting admin and maintenance).

Regular backup is vital to your online business too. Does your host have a contingency plan if their server fails? This is something you should know, and if they do not perform regular backups (daily at least), you should switch hosting because your business has no safety net.

Share this article:


view my profile on Google+