As a new web design agency, it was necessary for Zoocha to acquire some infrastructure (a dedicated server) so that our website, and more importantly the websites that we create had somewhere to live on the Internet. This is a very important decision because a good hosting provider will provide a fast and reliable platform for a website, whereas a poor hosting company will provide you with the opposite of one or both of those things! If SEO and traffic is important for your website, then it is worth looking beyond a hosting companies marketing efforts, and attempting to understand a bit more about the factors that go into making a good hosting company as even though two packages may appear equal on paper, in practice that may well not be the case. Here are some of the key things that you should look out for when choosing a dedicated server with a hosting company, irrespective of whether it is a Windows or Linux box:
Uptime
The amount of time that the site it available for visitors to use. Ideally this should be as close to 100% uptime as possible.
Data transfer bandwidth
This ultimately governs the speed in which visitors can download website assets at. The faster this is, the better. There is also an SEO benefit in being able to download a site faster – At PubCon (November 2009), Matt Cutts who is an important figure at Google, said that there has been a strong push internally at Google to introduce Website Speed as a new ranking factor into the their search algorithm.
Traffic bandwidth
Make sure that this is generous enough to cover the traffic levels that you anticipate getting, and then make sure that you have plenty of room for growth within this. Be wary of “unlimited” bandwidth packages as they normally have a “fair use” clause in the terms and conditions which point out that the bandwidth usage isn’t actually unlimited at all.
Storage space
Generally speaking, your main server shouldn’t need a great deal of storage space. Where possible, assets such as images, documents and videos should be stored on a CDN (to improve page loading times), and it should only be the core application files on the primary server.
Quick human response
When something goes wrong, you want to know that a support engineer at your hosting service provider will be there to assist. Always look for 24-hour support and make sure that it comes as standard with your package with no hidden charges. You could maybe test this by sending one of your short listed hosting companies an email and seeing how long they take to respond, or even calling their support line and seeing if you go straight through to a human.
There are also free online services such as Web Cop which claim to offer unbiased testing reports of the performance of hosting service providers. In doing these tests for the selection of the Zoocha hosting provider, we saw that one company consistently came out on top with regard to performance – here is a graph taken from Web Cop that benchmarks 4 of the top UK hosting companies:
UKFast isn’t cheap, but it is the best, and if we were to honour our core value of “providing and maintaining world class digital presence for our clients” then the decision to let UKFast become our hosting partner became an easy one. If Zoocha build and host a site for your company, you can rest assured knowing that it can be housed at no better place.
Update: We now use Amazon web services because it is even faster than UK Fast, and offers a level of control and flexibility that traditional hosting companies struggle to compete with.
