Tangent Thought Gallery

Finding the right web host (part 1)

Web hosting reminds me of home insurance. Everyone knows they need it. If you’re feeling lucky or you enjoy the adrenaline rush of huge risks, you tend to take a minimalist view. If you’re a pessimist or if you just happen to have experienced enough of life’s uncertainties then you get a bit more pragmatic. Our home was destroyed by a tornado several years ago. As you can imagine, even though our family thankfully emerged unscathed, the recovery for us and our entire neighborhood was daunting. Sadly, some of our neighbors found out at that time that their “bargains” on insurance weren’t such a deal after all.

The same applies to hosting. It’s funny that, although the question of “what’s the best host for __x__?” is one of the most frequently asked questions on networking sites, after a thorough answer it’s typically voiced with a subsequent follow up “oh (insert awkward silence here)…well, I really wasn’t meaning to spend that much!” Please understand I’m not advocating coming to your hosting options without concern for costs, but these must be put into perspective: what are you hoping to accomplish and how many headaches do you want to still entertain once online? We are talking about your most ubiquitous customer touch point, right? If you’re engaging in online commerce, we’re talking about revenue streams and customer satisfaction, right?

Since this is actually a large topic, my plan is to summarize top level issues in this post and, if time allows, get more granular in a subsequent post or two.

Decision matrix #1—questions to ask yourself at the outset:
1. Security and reliability—you need to start with these seemingly less exciting points, imo, compared to features, etc. Do you have critical, private data you’ll be storing on a database? (And please don’t tell me you’ll be storing credit card data—ever!) If you’re storing sensitive data, move away from shared hosting, unless, of course, you’re operating on shared servers with independent virtual servers. The related topic of performance, particularly of virtual database servers is important but out of scope for this post. What about DR? How is that handled and what’s the expected worse case scenario for downtime?
2. Features—what components, tools and tangential systems are on my “must have” list vs. those provided or available? Are these extensible? Can these be at all integrated with my back end systems? Are there business user tools available or does all interaction need to come through my internal IT support? Do I need internal IT support or can I better use those resources elsewhere?
3. Support—what is the support structure of the provider? Who do I contact and how? Who within my organization can make support calls? What is the skill set of those on support? How about level 2 & 3 support? What are their expectations of me and my staff? If needed, can I get someone on the phone 24×7 or am I limited to email or online chat support?
4. Qualifications—who are some of your hosting provider’s customers? You may not yet be an IKEA or Barnes & Noble, but your provider should be able to suggest success stories for organizations roughly similar to yours. Additionally, if they’re doing only commerce, they should already have already successfully passed PCI compliance audits, so you may want to ask about that as well.
5. How much involvement can you afford? — Specifically, your own tech resources staffed to maintain the operation. My opinion, you can rarely afford to staff adequately with your own resources so lean heavily on managed service providers. They’re really cheap at the price. Unless you originally got into business with the dream and end goal of running a data center.
6. Along the lines of “why did you get into business in the first place?” and “what are your core-competencies?” do you really want to own any hardware or software? Probably not, so move away from collocation. If you convert these costs (often capitalized) into monthly expenses as part of your lease/managed services agreement, you may find increased appeal on the financial end.

Assumption: most people will find they don’t want to host themselves nor, if they’re sharp, will they want to co-lo (co-lo makes sense if you’ve got some exiting servers but outside of that condition it’s probably not a factor). Additionally, most will be looking for either shared or dedicated hosting.

Now, if you simply Google something like “web host comparison” you’ll often get sites that may look legitimate but under the covers are marketing masquerading as a real site. Just be careful where you step. Here are a couple of lists with less vendor affiliation and more comparison of services:
http://webhost.thelist.com/
http://www.websitehostdirectory.com/

For those looking to host applications, more than sites, and particularly if you’d like to do this at not cost, check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_hosting_facilities

So much for the high notes. I hope to get a chance to address hosting in a low-end vs. high-end comparison in the future. For now, I hope this helps.