Choosing your web hosting
When you are searching for hosting for your business there are a couple of things to consider and price is not always the deciding factor.
Shared V Dedicated
Shared.
Often cheapest form of hosting, trouble is most businesss will start onsell at full price. Shared infrastructure can be bought for as little at 5;.95 a month for 1gb. Often hosting companies will carve that up to 100+ accounts charging 9.95 each. Makes good business sense, until some on the shared service uploads damaging code and the servers IP’s are blacklisted. This not only affects your site, but any one on the server. Think about it a server could have 500gb + of storage space. So simple maths that is 500 resellers, each selling 100 accounts, thats over 5000 websites out there that are sharing the same resources, same IP, same name server etc etc… The potential to go down hill very quickly is there.
Too often have we seen clients websites offline due to this issue.
Dedicated.
VPS Virtual Private Server. This is for all purposes your own server, though without the physical casing. We will most often have direct access to the administration of the box and more control over the resources and how they are used.
When you are buying hosting from your web development company, simply ask them. Where is my site being hosted and what is the configuration of the hosting? You as the business and site owner have the right to fully understand where your site is being hosted.
We have seen too many clients come unstuck in the shared world and have been offline for sometimes up to 48hours, while the IP is being cleared from the blacklists. At 101 we have a dedicated server with our own IP range, this means while there are multiple sites on the server, we have written each one of them and understand the code that is up there. Within minutes we are able to identify problems and have them resolved in a timely manner.
There is a sence of security that comes with a company that understands that your business is dependent on the reliability of your providers and that is why we will not recommend a shared reseller environment to our clients.
