On September 10, GoDaddy suffered from a massive outage of all of their services in the United States. Millions of customers who use GoDaddy’s databases, DNS services and email services found that all services were inoperable throughout the majority of the business day. This has prompted many business owners to become aware of the importance of hosting and to re-evaluate their website hosting options. Bop Design, a San Diego web design agency, has identified three critical factors in selecting a hosting provider. Bop Design Web Developer, Jordan Paraso comments, "Hosting gives life to a firm's website and email system. If it goes down, a firm's entire operation will go down. With many of our clients being affected by the GoDaddy outage, they have requested some guidance."
The following are Bop Design's key factors to selecting the right hosting provider:
1. Uptime Rate
A small business owner never wants their website down. An uptime rate is the percentage of time a firm's website will be up and not down. Paraso says, "A firm wants to find a hosting provider with a 99.9% guarantee. A small business cannot take any chances. Even a 99% uptime rate is 7 hours a month of the website being down."
2. Content Management Compatibility
Most business websites have a content management system like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. It's important to ensure that the hosting works well with the selected CMS. Bop Design typically uses a WordPress CMS and they have identified HostGator as an optimal hosting solution for WordPress websites. Paraso comments, "From my experience with other hosting providers, WordPress performance is significantly slower and less responsive in comparison to HostGator's servers. HostGator was ranked as the Best WordPress Hosting of 2012 by WordPressHostingReviews.com."
3. Usability
Some hosting providers' control panels can be confusing, hard to navigate and always trying to upsell other products. Paraso suggests, "If a business is unsure about a hosting company and its usability, don’t sign up for a long term plan. Check to see if there is a trial period or month-to-month billing. This way if a firm is not satisfied, they can switch to a different host quickly instead of having to wait for your plan to end."
In conclusion, hosting is relatively inexpensive and considering that it powers all of a firm's web communication, it's money well spent.
Bop Design is a boutique marketing communications firm headquartered in San Diego with offices also in the New York metro area. We express your business’ values through branding, advertising, design and web design. We also help attract your ideal customer through search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Our focus is on small businesses that want an external team of marketing specialists to help give their brand an edge in the marketplace.
