Customized Software Development

With so many hosting options available, it can be hard to decide where you should host your website. Before you go out looking for a hosting company, you should analyze your wants and needs, just as you would do with any other purchase you make. It doesn't make sense to pay for a year's worth of hosting to find out later that you can't do what you need to do at this particular company.

For any of you that are kind of new to this whole web thing, let me point something out. You don't necessarily have to have your own domain name (like www.WaupacaComputerConsulting.com) in order to have a web site. If you just want a place where you can put the kid's pictures so that all of your relatives can see them, you might want to check with your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Every ISP I have ever used has included some web space with my account. If you are just putting up a site for fun, why not use what you're already paying for? You may not get all the features you would if you were paying for it, but chances are you don't need them any way. You should realize that your web address is going to be something like: http://webpages.charter.net/TheUserNameOnYourAccount, but does that really matter? For a personal, just for fun website, I think it's just fine. On the other hand, if this is a business website, I recommend that you get your own domain name. Your business will appear less "fly by night" if your website has it's own domain name.

For the people who have their own domain name (or are getting one) and need to find a place to host their site, here are some questions you may want to think about before you start your search.

• How big is the website?
• Will you be using ASP, PHP or Perl?
• Is your website built with FrontPage?
• What kind of support do you want?
• Will you be selling things online?
• Is a guarantee on up time important to you?
• Are you building the site yourself or do you have an IT staff or a consultant doing it for you?

Let's examine why your answers to these questions will be important to your decision. Most hosting companies are going to have different plans that offer different features. If your website is huge because you sell 10,000 products online and each one of those products has 3 pictures and the whole web site is powered by a SQL backend; then you better make sure that the plan you sign up for gives you enough space, allows you to have a SQL database and that you can use ASP. On the other hand, there is no sense paying for 300 MB of space when your entire site is less than 1 MB. For those of you that use FrontPage, you'll want to make sure that the server you'll be on has FrontPage extensions. I think that's pretty standard these days, but if you've used any of the "special" features in FrontPage and you get on a server where they don't work, you're not going to be real happy.

Usually when I'm looking for a product or a service, I want to go with a local company. I wouldn't want to travel 1000 miles every time I needed a box of paperclips or to meet with my accountant. It's a little different when you're looking for a hosting company. It's not like you're running down to their office with your new files every time you make a change to your site. In that respect it really isn't going to matter if the company is next door or in the next state. As far as staying in contact with them or asking them questions, if it's all done via e-mail their location still isn't going to matter. There are of course other reasons that going with a local company might be important to you. I would think that the majority of companies would have toll free numbers if they offer phone support, but if they don't and phone support is important to you, you might want to find a company that has a local phone number. The hosting company I'm with finds it more efficient to only offer e-mail support. I have never found this to be a problem because they are very prompt about answering my questions and we never have to play phone tag. But some people like having a number to call. Another reason you may want a local company is because you are trying to spend your money locally. As a business person, I do try to spend locally as much as possible, but I also make sure that I am getting a reasonably good deal. You also may know someone at a local company or at least know some of their customers. It never hurts to ask around to find out where other people are hosting their sites. It will give you some insight as to what kind of service you can expect from the company.

Depending on what you have on your site, you may need a guarantee of up time. Some hosting companies will offer this. Others have a very high percentage of up time and for most of us, if once or twice a year our site goes down for 15 minutes; it's not really a big deal, but some of you may find this unacceptable.

If you aren't building the site yourself, you may want to take into consideration the recommendation of whoever is building your site. If it is someone like myself, I have had the experience of dealing with different companies and have very strong opinions on which ones I would recommend and which ones I wouldn't. Let me tell you a couple of stories. I was helping a client implement a shopping cart she had purchased and there were a few issues that came up that we needed some questions answered from her hosting company. They were great! Anything we asked we got very prompt and efficient help with. In talking to my client, she raved about how great this company had always been with her. After that experience, even though I don't use them myself, I would highly recommend them. By the way, she pays around $5 a month for her service. I have another client whose web site was already up and running and they needed some maintenance done on it. For a contact e-mail on their site, they were using a Yahoo e-mail address (i.e., info_xyz_company@yahoo.com). My feeling is that it looks more professional to have an e-mail address with your domain name in (i.e., info@xyz.com). I'm used to being able to set up my own e-mail addresses via the control panel of my account. The whole process takes me less than 5 minutes. I won't go into the gory details of everything that happened, but let's just leave it at this: after 2 days and probably 5 phone calls (where I was treated VERY rudely each time), I finally got a couple of e-mail addresses set up. What's really interesting to me is that if you go to this company's web site and look at their hosting plans, their cheapest one costs $29 per month and you basically have NO features. Hmmm, which of these 2 companies would you choose?

Seeing as though we've touched on the subject of money, how much do you want to spend? You DO NOT have to pay a lot of money to get a reliable hosting company that has all of the features that most of us need. Some of you may have some really special needs that are going to cost more money, but many web sites don't. I pay $5 a month and am EXTREMELY happy with my company. Why should I go to the next hosting company and pay $20 or $30 a month? Check out my hosting company and see all the features I get for my money. You may want to use their list of features and their costs as a comparison while you're shopping around, or better yet, why not just use them?