So i was surfing around youtube yesterday (as i have been known to do) and i saw this rather funny but also quite useful video from this guy about web-hosting. Its not a bad video as hes explaining some of the same points i have gone over on the blog before about what you should look for in a host before you buy and its definitely worth a look.
He is right that the hosting service market is way over saturated and there are too many companies competing for too few customers however im not sure if hes right in saying the “most hosting providers are trying to rip you off”. It is true that there are some bad hosting companies out there but mostly i think its a case of a few bad apples giving everyone else a bad name. I think you could say the same of any modern industry if you look hard enough. So worth a view if you have time and i hope to have a few in depth posts with you guys asap.
I know that one of the biggest changes i have seen in the web hosting service industry over the past few years is the rise of the “all you can eat” pricing structure. What i mean by this is hosting accounts that allow you to host an unlimited number of domains and also give you unlimited data transfer. I can say that this has been a big shift in the pricing structure in a number of ways as i remember the days when you literally bought a hosting account that hosted a specific number of domains, like 14! Now thanks to the falling prices of both disk space and data transfer its possible to get some really cheap accounts where you can do have all you space and transfer you need. The prices are really pretty good to, i was looking at an American host the other day that was coming in at only £15 for unlimited transfer and domains.
I know at this point alot of people are probably thinking that they probably don’t need unlimited transfer and they only have around 5 sites at the moment. This may be true but one of the best things about this time of hosting service is it means you don’t have to worry about space or transfer anymore, you really will never have to check you bandwidth log again! This can also prove quite useful if you plan on getting some huge spikes in traffic. I know that a few years ago one of my articles went viral and hit the front page of Digg. This resulted in around 20,000 visitors in the space of a few hours. It ending up being quite a bit of data transfer as you can imagine but because i was on an unlimited plan it didn’t matter! This is also true of creating new websites as you can just go into your main control panel and have a new site up and running in a few minutes.
One thing to be aware of though is the small print as there will always be some clause about “reasonable usage”. Now with most providers this isn’t really an issue as all they are doing is trying to protect themselves from people who may abuse the service. There are however reports of some service providers using it to kick off some medium use users, ie they are hoping most people use very little of their bandwidth. Still i think this accounts for a very small percentage of web hosts and shouldn’t be an issue for most.
So there you have it, my roundup of opinions on unlimited web hosting, more to come soon!
So it has been said for a while but it looks like it may finally become a real fact. Google has announced that from 2010 the speed of your website could become a factor in the authority/ranking of your website. More and more businesses are looking to get an edge when it comes to ranking in google and even something which many only be a small factor (as i suspect it is) can make a huge difference when the competition is so fierce.
If you think about googles reasons for introducing this change it does kind of make sense. Google has always been about the overall experience of the user and what annoys users more than a website that is slow to load? However i must mention at this point that there can be two main factors why a site may be slow to load:
The web hosting service is just plain slow. This is obviously the easiest one to fix as i just means you have to get a new web-host. However finding a new host can also be alot of hassle too and will sometimes mean you have to pay more £££! Moving your site can also be a pain too, depending on the type of site you have. For instance if it is a ecommerce site there could be a bit of initial setup involved and you may have to get the person who initially created the site to complete the installation for you.
The second option is an often overlooked factor and it is that your website is too large as far as file size is concerned. So while the web host is able to send your site out the visitors at high speed the visitor can only receive the site as fast as their connection will allow. Dont forget that many people are still in slow dialup connections (especially in developing countries) and may not be able to view your site within a reasonable time. The solution for this is to re-design your site with speed in mind. Lose any very large pictures or flash movies and concentrate in breaking the content up into bite-size chunks.
So as you can see the two factors above require a reasonable amount of work no-matter which is related to your site. So why go to all this hassle in the first place? Is is just for Google? Well no, this shouldn’t just be something you are doing to keep google happy but because you want to increase the overall profitability of your business on the web. This is especially true of ecommerce sites as it has been proved more than a few times to me that potential customers do not hang around long if there are service problems on with your online shop. How confidant can they be of getting what they paid for if you can’t even get your website to work?
I once read that even amazon.com has a cart conversion rate of only 40% which is the number of people who add things to the online cart and then go on to buy. You may think this number is very low considering that amazon has so much trust with customers but it is a pretty standard number across the industry. However also realise that you as a start-up business are going to have an even smaller conversion rate as customers have never heard of you before and may be nervous about purchasing. The point i am trying to make is that if there are problems with the booking process or website in general such as pages being slow to load then your conversion rate is going to go through the floor!
As you can see a slow web hosting service isn’t going to just affect your position in google but the revenue of your site as a whole and so it has to be one of your main priorities for your internet business. Still one of the hardest things is working out who the fast hosting providers are, as they all they they have high speed connections don’t they! Well the main thing i would look for is the right account with plenty of bandwidth for the month as a whole. Also checking for guaranteed uptime is also a good thing to look for. So hopefully ive given you a few reasons to look for speed in your next hosting provider and maybe youll be zooming your way to the top of google in no time.
