Poor website hosting decision can be costly

Release time：2011-01-27
Browse：3323

Hosting buyers rarely check out how reliable the servers are that they are storing their information on. Photo/REUTERS

Worldwide, on the internet, special offers abound, offering to host companies websites and giving the email addresses we need for our domain name.

But for the hundreds of thousands of companies who sign up to cheap hosting, far too many move onto a path that ends with no website and no addresses, and a hopeless task in getting either back up and running.

With their domain name assigned to the far-distant host, they often cannot even retrieve their original name, as we have seen with yet another client who has walked in our door asking for a way to rescue what he began.

Same beginning

The beginning is almost the same. The company has employed a web developer. They, or he/she, set up the hosting with little discussion on which host to use.

A host is found, or mentioned, the money is sent, and the codes are sent by the new host to enable the web developer to upload the website to its far-away server, and set up the email addresses. Sometimes, a company never gets further.

They experience a problem uploading and only then realize there is no customer care number.

They cannot reach the server administrator to find out what the problem is. They cannot get answers to their emails.

In a way, these are the luckier ones. If they have to abandon poor hosting at the start, they may take the hosting decision a bit more seriously the second time, and end with the kind of hosting that makes for long-term success.

For those companies whose web developers do manage to upload the site successfully, and set up the email addresses, the web developers job is often finished.

A way goes the out-sourced expert, and on runs the website. Until it doesn't. And, once again, there isn't a hope with the huge commodity hosting sites of getting a human being to check out the reason, let alone correct it.

The same goes with emails. Emails stop arriving. Or junk comes in bucketfuls into the address. And these companies are without the smallest chance of any user support.

More than that, hosting buyers rarely check out how reliable the servers are that they are storing their information on.

Top hosts come with guarantees that your website will be working just about all the time, and customers who can confirm that they are.

Poor hosting is plagued with downtime, when your site is off-air, and you are getting notes about maintenance, and apologies, or often, no emails at all about anything: its all just down.

The real treat, however, for the many who end up fowled up on poor hosting is the moment when they’ve abandoned all (futile) efforts to communicate with the host.

They have no website up. They cant reach the data they uploaded. Nothing is working.

And they decide to try again elsewhere. Only the new host cant get their domain name moved, or even point it to a new server, without the co-operation and communication with the original host.

When that fails, the next discussion becomes starting again with a new name.

Another tack is waiting for the original name to expire in the hope of re-buying it as soon as its up for sale again.

And even that gets to be fraught. For, once a name has been registered, there are just a few companies who have realised that very many of those expired domain names have come up precisely because they've got tangled in a dead end behind poor hosting.

So they grab them, and out go emails to the original owner offering to sell them for a very reasonable price.

So reasonable is the price, for the new seller, that it bears no resemblance at all to the standard domain name price everyone was hoping to pay at expiry.

The adventure

And so ends the adventure into poor hosting with a whopping bill to get the original name back at all, a whole year, or even two years down the line from the original poor hosting decision.

Its not something I would write about if I had not seen so many companies mangled up by it. In the 21st century, we all need emails and we all need corporate websites.

Yet the simple and most basic mistake that causes the most costs and the longest setbacks comes down, most often of all, to the hosting decision at the very beginning.

Site hosting depends on customer care that can be reached, and responds, and on hosts that are spending properly on maintenance and back-up to keep everything working.

It just is a space where cheap is really cheap, from billing right through to everything that follows.

Source from Business Daily Africa

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Todaynic.com International Limited(Todayisp.com) was incorporated in Hong Kong in 2005, directly under Todaynic.com, Inc. which was established in 2000. As one of the first ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), Verisign, HKDNR, and CNNIC (The China Internet Network Information Center) accredited registrars, Todayisp is also a leading provider of services in domain name registration and web hosting.

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