Chapter 3

[Bruceper]

Chapter 3 - Be a good host, or find one now (includes domain registrars)

You've got the script, you're got the domain, and you have your content. By now I'm sure you've found a host too. But are they the right host? Are they a good host? Those are difficult questions to answer for most people. We'll go through a number of things and I'll tell you the biggest warning signs to run away from real fast while covering your head with a wet towel so you don't go down in flames.

The sad part is that I could probably write a book about bad hosts. Not because I've been with them, but because I've seen people burn themselves because they made the wrong choices. To you, hosting may not sound like a big deal. Pay $3 per month and your website is up, it's all good right? Oh so wrong.

Remember you typically get what you pay for. And using a free host or a cheap one is going to come back and bite you in the butt. But before you can get a host, you need a domain name, so we'll talk about that first.

What is a domain name? It's simply a name people on the internet can find you by. It's a lot easier for most people to remember fishing-links.com than it is to remember 192.168.0.1. Domain names typically range in cost from $5 to $15 per year depending on what extension (.com or .net or .info or .bz or .whatever) you buy. The main extension is .com and this is probably what you want to go for. However, most of the good .com domains are taken. You can still find some but for the most part you are limited. You can also buy a domain from someone else but that's a different story and we won't go into that here.

If you live outside the US you may have an advantage however. Many countries have their own extension such as .ca for Canada, .fr for France, .co.uk for the United Kingdom, .eu for the European Union and so on. If your target market is people living in those countries then you may want to look at getting a country code (CC) extention rather than a .com. Quite often you can find a CC domain that is available when the .com is not.

So you think of a name and now you need somewhere to register it. You hear about all sorts of companies and when you search you find even more. Who is a decent registrar and who isn't and how can you tell? A decent registrar has many qualities that depend on what you want out of them. Some people swear by GoDaddy, but if you've ever asked for support you will find form responses that don't answer your question. And if you have a problem you could wait days to get a proper response back. If all you're after is price then GoDaddy is your ticket to cheapdom.

Most registrars are like this nowadays. Big and slow and unresponsive. If they aren't big then they're resellers. How do I know this? It costs tens of thousands of dollars to become a registrar for the .com/net/org domains. However anyone with a few dollars can be a reseller, but it doesn't mean they know what they're doing. Most resellers can get you a good price, but they are still at the mercy of the parent company when a problem strikes.

What if your domain is hijacked because you forgot to lock it? You might not notice for two days because your ISP's DNS cache doesn't update for 48 hours. By then your domain has been transferred twice and you're not going to get it back easily. Recently some changes were made by ICANN to stop this type of thing from happening, but it can still happen.

I've seen registrars go under, I've seen them close up shop, seen them sell to another company and many other nasty scenarios that make it difficult for you to change or manage your domain name. You also need a company that is stable.

You want a registrar that has good prices, great support and is secure and stable. Now that's something hard to find but not impossible and I'll tell you who to use. The companies name is moniker, and their address is http://www.moniker.com. No affiliate link here so I can make 25 cents from someone clicking on the link. It's just the straight honest truth. Sure their up front pricing might be a bit more expensive, but there's a secret to getting better pricing, just ask for it.

If you're only registering one domain they probably won't give you their best pricing. But if you have a few dozen or more they probably will.

So now you've got yourself a registrar and a domain name. Now you need a host.

What defines a good host? Good server uptime, a very strong Terms Of Service, Acceptable Use Policy and Privacy Statement. The ability to get personal support from someone who speaks your language (or at least can type it) from someone who knows more about webhosting than you ever will. An SLA that details exactly what you're going to get and being in a good datacenter with multiple backbones and redundancy.

So we'll go through these one at time and I'll tell you why it's good to have a host like this. Good uptime is obvious, it means that the server is up (running and working) for most if not all of the time. Of course servers need to get restarted so I'm not talking about some server that's been up for 946 days. I'm talking about being able to serve data to all visitors almost all of the time. There are sites on the net where you can check a companies uptime, research this before you buy.

The Terms Of Service (TOS), Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and Privacy Statement all make a difference to you. Starting with the TOS this document typically deals with the conduct expected of you and anyone else using the service you are purchasing. This could include privacy issues not covered in the privacy statement, legal issues, billing, payment, refunds and more. The more detailed the TOS is, the better the host is protected. But that also means you know exactly what you're getting into since you are agreeing to it when you sign up. You know if refunds are available or how their cancellation policy works.

The next item is the AUP whic typically defines what your host considers acceptable use from you and anyone else using your account. This will deal with issues such as copyright infringement, email (commercial and personal), system security and general do's and don'ts. By signing up to the service you were supposed to read this and you have agreed to it. For example you would have known that buying email lists to send advertising to is allowed or not.

Next is the Privacy Statement and this generally deals with how the host will handle your data and what they can, will and won't do with it. A good read typically, but remember you are agreeing to it when you sign up.

Personal support means that someone is going to answer your question either by phone, live chat or by email. And when I say answer I mean with a real response not with a form response that doesn't answer your question. And they're going to answer your question with the right answer the first time.

An SLA is a Service Level Agreement. Typically really good hosts will have an SLA. An SLA states that your service will be working properly for xx% of the time and if it's not then this is what they will do to rectify the agreement. I've seen hosts issue partial refunds for breaking their SLA, I've seen them issue complete refunds for that month, and I've seen them chicken out of doing anything when they have broken the SLA and later changed the SLA to make it much more favorable to them.

A datacenter is a building where hundreds or thousands of servers are hosted. This is a building with raised floors, redundant air conditioning, diesel backup generators for extended power outages, uninterruptable power supplies for short term outages and high security. This is not some kids house where he offers to host your site on his mom's Dell computer in the basement over a DSL line. A host in this kind of building is paying good money for all the nice features, and you're going to pay for it too. But in the long run it pays off.

Multiple backbones means that different data carriers are available to send your data over the internet. Think of this like having a cable or DSL connention in your home from 5 different companies. If one company goes down, the other 4 are still there so you can still connect to the internet. This is redundancy, the ability to fall back on something or someone else in case of a problem.

How does having a good host help? Well I'm sure you remember the north east blackout which took down the entire northeastern part of the United States and part of Canada. My server was hosted in a datacenter in New York and it had 100% uptime during that blackout. That's right, not one of my sites was down for the entire blackout. Can the kid in his basement with his mom's computer say the same thing? Probably not.

What happens when your site is down? You lose business! You lose customers who might be clicking on your ads and making you money. You lose potential advertisers. You lose new members. You lose.

If you're serious about your host then you need to stop being cheap and start paying. I myself run a webhost, and I offer all of the above things and yet the cost to host a site on my server on average is only $10 a month. This is where we can easily seperate the bad hosts from the good.

For $10 per month on my host you get 100MB of disk space and 2000MB (2GB) of bandwidth per month. That's not a lot, when you consider that some of my small sites average 5GB of bandwidth a month. Now think if you had 20 sites doing 5GB a month and what it would cost you. We'll get into that in a bit. But first we'll get back to the bad vs. good hosts.

Why do I offer so little for the price? Because by offering what I do, and charging what I do, I can afford to have my server somewhere where I know it will be taken care of any time of the day and in any situation.

Recently my server was having a problem with memory and CPU usage. CPU and memory usage was high, so I sent in a support ticket to my host. Fifteen minutes later he was telling me there was a problem with the server and the console would crash every time they tried to log in. It was determined that there was a hardware issue but they were not sure where it was. To solve the issue, they took the drive out of the faulty machine and placed it in an identical but brand new server. Now with less than five minutes of down time my server is back up and running and they deal with the broken machine when they have time. They took care of me like I take care of my clients. Total time including messages back and forth, 23 minutes and the problem was solved.

What would happen to the kid in his basement? Well first he'd run some program to test the hardware. Then probably shut down to run some bootup hardware utilities, then have to go to the store an hour later when he determined what was wrong, come back home, install the hardware, install drivers and restart. Hopefully this would take less than 3 hours of downtime. Remember that I had about 5 minutes of downtime.

By the way, a good host doesn't care if it's 3AM on a saturday night and Revenge of the Half Naked Space Girls was just starting on TV. A good host has the parts in the datacenter to fix your equipment when it needs to be fixed.

As for cost, I've seen hosts offer "unlimited" bandwidth. Just stay away, no matter what price they charge. I've seen hosts that charge $1.99 for 5GB of hard drive space an 150GB of bandwidth per month. Of course they'll get a lot of customers, and to save money they throw hundreds of customers on one machine because they know that the average new site only uses a few megs of space and less than 100MB of bandwidth per month. So they oversell their server and it starts to run really slow. You complain but they warn you that you might lose your account for yelling at them.

A decent host will limit the number of sites on a server so that the server can run at it's fastest speed and still be able to handle anything it needs to. In some cases this could mean one site on a server, or it could mean 200 sites. It depends on the sites themselves and the host will watch to make sure everything is going well.

So we know a lowball price is yet another sign of a bad host, what are some more? The lack of contact information is usually another good one. Do they actually list their real address? Most companies run out of their house won't. My business is run out of my home, but my server is in a great datacenter. I'm not afraid to list my home address or a contact number. I personally don't do telephone support, and that is my decision which does have it's reasons. But a high end host will have an 800 number they can be contacted at.

Another way to determine a good host is to look for reviews on legitimate sites such as http://www.webhostingtalk.com or http://www.dnforum.com. These sites are filled with people that have used and continue to use hosts from all around the world but the majority are in the US. They can tell you if a host has a good track record. Do not trust review websites as they are all too often filled with bogus reviews submitted by the company itself.

And lastly, a good hosting company will have a long history of business. On the internet a long history can mean only a few years. But I've seen hosts come and go in as little time as a few days.

So what do you do if you run 20 or 50 or 100 sites? You find a good host that will rent you a dedicated server. This is going to cost you from $100 to $500 per month, but since it's your own server you can do a lot more than you can on just a webhosting plan or a reseller plan. Now you can install scripts, subdomains, offer hosting, your own email server, dozens of databases and a place to call home.

A managed server means that someone at the hosting company is there to help you manage your daily operations of the server. I'm not talking about fixing hardware, I'm talking about installing software for you, setting up DNS tables or setting up a firewall. Of course you pay for a service like this. And the fee can be as high as an extra $50 to $100 per month. This fee is included in the price you pay so you don't really see it, but it's there. You can get an unmanaged server for a pretty low cost (in the $100 per month range). If you don't know how to run a server (trust me, unless you run a server at home daily you probably don't know enough) you would need a managed server. But what if I could tell you how to save some money?

The next tip I'll give you is about managed vs. unmanaged. There is a wonderful company called Platinum Server Management (http://www.platinumservermanagement.com/) that will manage your server for you for a cost of only $29 per month. That's right, you can get an unmanaged server, save around $100 per month and pay them $29 per month and they'll do the same thing for you that the host would. How great is that? And yes, I use them. I use them because they are experts at what they do and they can do things 10 times faster than I can which saves me time so I can do work for clients and make money. Drop them a note, tell them I sent you.

Take your time, do your research and choose a good quality host.

Copyright 2007 Bruce Peresky - All Rights Reserved - No duplication permitted without written permission from the author