Know Your Website Host
A couple of months ago a client contacted us to have a domain registered, but wasnt ready to have his site hosted. So we registered the domain as requested. More recently he contacted us and said he found a company that was offering web hosting services for a lower rate than we were, and he wanted his domain to point to them. So we requested the name server information and applied the changes to the domain. 24 hours later when the domain should have fully propagated, he was still unable to view his website. The hosting company he was with was unable to offer him a solution (when he was finally able to get someone on the phone) and told him it must be a problem at our end. Having been doing this for many years, I informed him that the domain was no longer linked to anything related to Caribyte, and as such there was nothing more we could do to make it work - everything else must be done by the new registrar on the new servers.What this client found out the hard way is that when choosing a company to host your website, price is not everything. I've always held a firm belief that you should choose your web hosting company with the same due diligence as you would use for choosing the person that builds your house. Price is not the only factor you should consider. Trust and track record are of equal, and in fact greater, importance.
When we first offered hosting services, our prices were the lowest in this country - bar none. However, we didn't just pick an arbitrary number and use that as our price. Careful thought was put into selecting the right server (yes in those days we had a single server), and given the capabilities of the server and the amount of time we were expecting to spend in supporting clients who hosted with us, we came up with a value that would cover our costs and provide us a reasonable profit. It took some effort but we built up our client base, and our hosting services were profitable within 6 months. Lowest price in the country, profitable in 6 months.
Remember when selecting a web hosting company that they will have full control over the availability of your website. If there are problems (an in an IT world there usually are) you have to be able to count on that person to work with you to fix them. Be sure you can get ahold of a real person at the company, find out what their 24 hour policy is, ask for references of other sites they host, and how long they've been in the hosting business.
Look out for a second part to this article. Feedback can be sent from our contact page.