Tips for selecting a web host

One of our sons is buying a home, and he is learning how hard it is to evaluate mortgage offers. Because the various lenders manipulate things like buy-down points, origination fees, floating vs. fixed rates, mortgage insurance, etc., he is finding it difficult to compare apples to apples.

In my experience, the same kind of obfuscation occurs in most industries, including my own. For example, I have a friend that is starting an online business, which is obviously going to be very dependent on her website. She is looking for the best value in a solid company to host her site for her, and she is having the same difficulty making a meaningful comparison.

I think she is wise to shop carefully. Many companies that have websites have not taken into consideration the potential drawbacks of making a bad choice for their web host.

One law firm that I know chose to host its website with a company that offered exceptionally low prices for hosting legal websites. At first everything went well, but as their website grew and they wanted to customize it, they found the host to be quite inflexible. At last, they decided to move their site to a different host, and found that the original host was very uncooperative. What should have been a simple transaction, turned out to be quite complicated and expensive.

Another company invested significant time and effort to build an online catalog and store using the tools provided by their web host. When they discovered that some of their email was being blacklisted by antispam organizations, they investigated the host a little more carefully. They learned that their host was not particularly discriminating in the companies they hosted, and there were spammers among them. For this reason, all of the host’s customers were in danger of having their outbound email blacklisted. When the company tried to move to a different host, they found that the commercial portion of their website could not be moved.

If you have a website, or are thinking of having one, you should be aware that there are three types of arrangements for hosting your website. The arrangement you will chose should be determined, at least in part, by your answer to the question: How important is the website to your business?

If the website is “business-critical,” you may want to consider a dedicated server. The server may be your own, which you pay to “co-locate” in the host’s datacenter, or you may lease a server from the host. This is usually the most expensive option for hosting a website, but if properly situated, it is ideal for high volume sites and ones that need high availability and security.

The least expensive option for hosting a website is generally through a reseller. A reseller has no datacenter, he just rents server space in a datacenter and then tries to resell it. Resellers commonly offer very low rates and promise many features. Unfortunately, resellers are notoriously unstable, and many go in and out of business regularly. For this reason, they often request that you pay your hosting fees annually, just in case they close up shop part way through the year. Resellers may try to enhance their revenue streams by exposing your site’s visitors to banner advertising and pop-ups.

Because resellers have no infrastructure of their own, if technical issues arise, there can be a lot of finger pointing before you get it resolved – which you can often only accomplish via email. In my opinion, a reseller is an acceptable host, only if you don’t care what happens to or through the website.

In the middle ground are shared hosts. Under this arrangement, your website will share a server with hundreds of other websites. Your costs will be lower than with a dedicated server, but higher than through a reseller. However, because your host actually owns the server and the datacenter, you will have fewer points of contact if things go south.

There are, I suppose, thousands of hosting companies in the country. Unfortunately, there are very few worthwhile reviews or ratings of web hosts to help you evaluate them. For this reason, it seems best to me to go with someone local, with whom you can talk to face-to-face and possibly even tour the datacenter. Alternatively, I would suggest going with one of the big hosts like Yahoo! or Microsoft. Doing so may not make it easier to compare their offerings, but you are more likely to get what you pay for.