For many clients, the issue of hosting is either too technical or too boring to be of any real interest. In reality, hosting has a massive impact on your website, your business and your bottom line.

Clients are often tempted to opt for the cheapest hosting package on the assumption that all host companies offer a similar product. Wrong.

Try and liken a hosting provider to a petrol station. Unless you know exactly how your engine works, you would buy from the one selling the cheapest product. The comparison works for a few important reasons:

1. Working with a hosting provider is a relationship, because you will depend on the provider to support your website round-the-clock. Petrol stations just sell stuff that makes your car go.
2. Unless you buy from a supermarket pump, you can be assured of the brand of the petrol you buy and you need only select unleaded or super-unleaded. The quality of the hosting service depends on a large number of factors such as bandwidth (how much traffic your website can receive), uptime (the proportion of time that your website is available) and support (the service you receive when a system fails). Petrol does more than make your car go.
3. Hosting is a technical subject, and it can be hard to differentiate the important facts from the marketing spin. Petrol is also a complicated subject, but only if you care what it does to your engine.

Price is important, but there isn’t really a one-size-fits-all hosting solution, so comparing costs alone won’t really help. You need to make sure that your website is supported by the most appropriate hosting for you.

Cheap hosting very often is just that and unfortunately, when things go wrong, the savings you’ve made are wiped out in seconds with either lost sales or expensive costs to resolve the issues.

What’s the problem with budget hosting?

With unreliability comes downtime, and with downtime comes cost. How much does it cost you if your website is broken?

For example, a company we know chose to save £100 a month by opting for a cheap hosting provider. Over Christmas their hosting failed and their website was offline for three days.

Total savings: £1200 per annum.

Total cost of three days’ downtime:
£10,000 in lost sales
+ £1000 in wasted advertising spend
+ £1000 to resolve the issue
+ £? In brand value

What made this incident worse was that it caused them to miss the Boxing Day sales which would have accounted for a large proportion of their yearly revenue. On the scale of things the problems they experienced were actually pretty minor (no data was lost) but even so the pain was substantial!

The hidden X factor

From experience a hard lesson I’ve learnt is that ‘technical support’ is often the hidden quantity in hosting. It’s the X factor that makes all the difference because… It really matters when you need it.

Budget hosting providers will often have long call-waiting times going through to a call-centre of front-line support staff who have limited technical experience or skills.

Much better to be on first name terms with your support team – to pick-up the phone and say: “Mark, I have a serious problem can you pull out all the stosp on this one?”

A simple test of the support quality can be to call their technical support team before you buy anything. Typically sales calls can be answered within two seconds and support calls within 10 minutes!

What can you do?

Check with your hosting provider. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Ask about the datacentre (the building where your server lives), average uptime, hardware replacement time and when they have support technicians on-site.

It’s also a good idea to chat with your web agency. Most will have a preferred hosting provider or will be able to put a solution together for you.

At a friend’s party last week, I had the pleasure of meeting a number of people for the first time. At some point in our conversations, normally just after the first lull but before we have found out we have something in common, we would discuss our jobs.

“So what do you do?” asks Jeff, feigning moderate interest.

“I make websites,” I reply, wondering if he will find this a geeky and boring thing to do every day.

“That’s very geeky,” says Jeff. “How do you make a good website?”

“Well…”

This, of course, is a very important question. How we approach our business is constantly adapted to our clients’ priorities, best practice in the digital media world, available technologies, and the expectations and goals of our audience.

At the time, I suspect I may have offered Jeff a clichéd idea about how a team of design, development and marketing specialists would combine to produce a site which looks great, works well and meets users’ needs. Although this is true, it is also vague given the broad range of skills which contribute to a website’s success.

If you will permit me, Jeff, I’d like to use my first posts in this blog, and those of some of my friendly colleagues, to answer the question of how we make a good website in more detail.

Which 2.0?

Before I proceed, I should mention that throughout this series we’ll try to keep jargon to a minimum. Perhaps because we work in an arena where creative types, technical wizards and marketing men all collaborate, our own language has evolved to help us understand each other.

However, there’s also a danger that these buzzwords will make us insular and introspective. An unhealthy barrier could emerge between those ‘in-the-know’ and those we are trying to reach. In order to avoid this, I’ll try and explain all my terms in everyday language, and I invite all of you reading to send me feedback if I am not making myself clear.

Ingredients for the recipe

In the upcoming series, my colleagues and I will discuss topics in detail, explaining how each discipline contributes to the success of a website.

Clear Purposes
It’s really important to have a clear idea of what the website is supposed to do, otherwise we have no idea how to measure its success.

User-Centred Design
We’ll discuss the principle of placing the user centre-stage in every decision concerning design to enhance useability. The objective is to create an engaging experience which streamlines the satisfaction of typical users’ objectives.

Information Architecture
Here we will discuss the importance of a logical structure for websites, and how navigation and orientation systems are designed and implemented.

Accessibility
An accessible website is one which can be used by all visitors regardless of their situation. It allows for physical and cognitive disabilities, as well as all the different types of computers and devices which can be used to access websites.

e-Marketing
Effectively engaging your target market is an essential part of gaining returns from your investment in a web project. Maximising these returns is the job of the e-marketing team.

Content
Writing content for websites requires an awareness of accessibility and search engine requirements, as well as a keen awareness of the purpose of each page.

Web Standards
Developing sites using web standards is key to the future-proofing of a project, and their use also has core benefits for accessibility and search engine marketing.

Reliable Hosting
A website’s hosting environment is as important as the programming used to build it. In this post we’ll take a look at maximising availability.

Statistics Analysis
Future enhancements and improvements of a website are best planned after we’ve carried out an astute analysis of current visitor statistics. A website never stands still, and expert monitoring can give great insights into the effectiveness of a website.

Bringing it all together

Co-ordination and Management
I would say that each of these aspects should be addressed to ensure the success of a new website. Although the priority for each would vary depending on the client’s requirements, I always find it helpful to think about how each discipline is a vital individual consideration.

For example, no project is just a ‘design’ project, because no design can be completed without due thought as to how it will be implemented. Similarly, no additions introduced for search engine marketing purposes should be coded without due regard for web standards, or how they will actually appear to human visitors.

I invite you to join the Webexpectations team as we take a walk through the multi-disciplinary world of web design, and explain how we all collaborate to create a successful web project.