Hosting - do your homework!!

[teenymunchkins]

I have felt inspired to write this post after myself and another member of this site suffered a lengthy period of downtime as our hosts didn't seem to have a clue what they were doing!

I had been with this particular host for just over a year, and despite an initial warning from the host I had left, I felt confident that everything would be fine.  He was fairly new to the business but offered cheap hosting and being a naive techy decided to go for it.

To start with everything was fine .. add ons were installed me for, got over a bit of a legal wrangle with the previous hosts and my site was functioning properly.  I then hit a glitch in the summer of last year .... I had done something with the site and lost it!!    Stupid me didn't do a backup and it appear that my hosts had also not been backing up despite promises that it would have been ... it had seemed there was some problem with MY site being backed up.  So, my site was partially re-installed but then had tons of work to do.  This loss also meant I lost customer details!


Yes, this was my first warning sign.

Just into the New Year, after I had paid for another year of hosting, my site went down completely for 5-6 days.  This was allegedly due to a bug in my Who's Online in my admin panel.  I was told my site would be up and running within 48 hours days later we were no nearer forward despite constant promises.  We also had big signs on our site saying our sites had been suspended ... not looking good for business!

After a lot of help from others in this forum I got my site up and running and ran away from the host and got my hosting elsewhere.

All this was brought home to me yesterday when I was doing a google search on a keyphrase I was on page 1 of google for ... I found myself right down to page 5 and am convinced it was down to this outage.

So .. when looking at hosting ... don't jump in feet first as I did, do your research!!  Ask around for host recommendations, find out what the host downtime is like, what is their back up protocol, what can they do to help you if you get stuck. 

Also, make sure you do your own back ups!!

I would hate for anybody to see their business go down for days on end because of their hosts failurre to give you the right information and get your site back up and running again with the minimal of fuss.

[scotserve]

Teeny

Yes I can confirm what you are saying as I was involved in the sorting out of the fall out from this incompetent host
Excuse after excuse - lie after lie about waiting for nameservers to propagate. In fact I showed one client how to get his site back up on there servers that they apparently were unable to do

In all my time in hosting and that has been a long time I have never seen a host put up a suspended site notice while doing any sort of maintenance work - the damage that can and would have done to an e-commerce site is ridiculous.

Backups are essential but you would be surprised just how many "hosts" do not backup data or maybe even only weekly which is useless for an active e-commerce site and even less verify the backups meaning they dont know if they are working.

The price differential between one of these cheap hosts and one offering a higher level of service is often just a few pounds a month - very little to pay for peace of mind and pales into insignificance to the costs when things go wrong.

Thanks for sharing that as it may open a few eyes 

[teenymunchkins]

In fact I showed one client how to get his site back up on there servers that they apparently were unable to do

It was you telling the other site how to do it which also got my site back up    Did that, then did a runner 

Yes, you are right about the price differential ... I am not paying much more for a host I know is respected and I can trust 

[scotserve]

I knew that - I was just being modest 

The thing i always tell clients and others though is a server is just a computer - it can and will go wrong, things will break down and software will develop incompatibilities ( you wont believe the amount of different pieces of software that have to work together on a server)
 
However when you are charging the price of a cup of tea to host a site you either need to be using very cheap equipment or be a relatively large company to pull it off - you also need to highly populate the servers to get a return.
Backups done properly cost a significant amount as does spam and virus protection along with security on the server, monitoring, 24/7 hands on - the list is endless but people see "hosts" offering really silly prices only to find out later they have absolutely no control over the actual services they provide and even worse do not understand what they are doing.

Sorry to jump in your thread but I am passionate about my industry and I hate to see people suckered into these types of accounts