Wondering about "web hosting"?

Here's some information that might help you understand it:

Much like Jane's web design scenario mentioned here, many businesses make the bad decision to host at the cheapest place possible. Although sometimes it's certainly a viable option, a good rule to go by is "the more complicated the site, the better the hosting". What this means is - let's say you have the base minimum website, which is just a page describing your business and some contact information. A site that simple can be hosted anywhere, and many of the mass-scale hosting companies like GoDaddy or Yahoo can handle it without a problem. They are extremely cheap, and they get the job done. However, once a website starts expanding a bit and using advanced features like databases, shopping carts, catalogs, etc, you find that there's a reason for those hosts being so cheap - they really aren't very good.

The giant hosting companies are giant because they host thousands and thousands of personal and small business websites, all piled onto their server arrays, and at any given moment something can go wrong, break, or disappear completely. And while "down time" happens to any web host, when problems happen to the big ones it's generally difficult to get the problems resolved. You, like the thousands of other people experiencing the downtime, are all going to be calling the web host looking for assistance. In response to that, most of the big-name web hosts resort to automated phone systems, where you end up talking to a menu instead of a live person. When you finally do get to a live person, then you're asked a series of canned tech questions by the person reading from a script. If that person can't resolve the problem from their canned script, (which more often than not, they won't), then you have to sit and wait while your problem is escalated to the next level of tech support. Then perhaps you may lose the phone connection altogether (calling on a cellphone?) and have to call back, only to find yourself sitting through the same canned script questions you just answered twenty minutes earlier. In a nutshell, tech support from the "big name" hosting companies is often a nightmarish and time-consuming experience.

As an alternative to that, there are smaller web hosting companies (like Ace-Con) that are local to most major cities, where you aren't just another customer in a sea of customers, you're an actual client that they are eager to pay attention to. You can call them locally on the phone and report a problem, and maybe even get some free technical advice along the way. Most smaller, local web hosting companies are far more eager to please their customers than some nameless person on the other side of the country will be, who is reading from a canned script. Additionally, the equipment setups are often more reliable and more robust with features, since the smaller companies don't have thousands of people vying for bandwidth and server resources.

So overall, yes, it may cost more per month to host with the smaller companies, but isn't the difference of five or ten dollars worth it for the reliability of your email and website? Isn't it worth it when you can talk to a live person quickly and easily if you have questions, or if something goes wrong? Time and again, it's proved its worth.