Facts about hosting

The following information is not commonly available from other hosts and is rarely mentioned in written articles for the Internet.

What is Cheap vs. Expensive Web Hosting?

The most commonly overlooked fact about hosting is it's real cost. The most expensive hosting is frequetly hosting for the cheapest purchase price. That is, poor hosting quality can have problems affecting how many visitors see your site, and ultimately, your sales volume potential. In one case, a sales loss of more than $100,000 over a 9 month period was experienced after a change in hosting servers. Now that's expesive hosting. Even small web sites can loose more than the price difference for better hosting.

Bandwidth .vs Data transfer

These terms are interchanged by some, confusing the end user. Bandwidth is the speed of a connection, expressed the amount of data transferred per second. Data transfer is the data amount over a longer period of time, usually a month. This is the number shown as in the hosting features, but it is sometimes labeled as "bandwidth".

When Bandwidth is a problem

Low price hosting frequently limits bandwidth per domain and/or per server. The result is a slower connection for website visitors. This can cause your site to load slower, have delays or even have connections time out. Restricting bandwidth saves money for the hosting company, aiding with price reductions to the website owner. Yet, you are never told about this in advance.

Data transfer requirements

Virtually any host offers a more than adequate allowance of data transfer. Only sites with very high page view quantities and those offering streaming video require lots of transfer. Yet, some hosts offer extreme amounts of data transfer to make their service look attractive. They seem to offer you more for your money -- something you don't need and won't use. Another ploy used by hosts marketing high data transfer volume is preventing you from actually using that high quantity. That can easily be done by restricting bandwidth. At a reduced bandwidth (speed), you would not possibly use all of the allotted data transfer.

Bandwidth quality varies

All bandwidth quality is not the same. The lower the tier number, the higher the quality. Most hosting companies use either tier 3 or tier 4 bandwidth. A few companies, including Web Wings Net, use tier 2 bandwidth. Tier 1 is reserved for major carriers, although you may see a host advertising tier 1, the fact is they are not on a tier 1 connection. Having a tier 1 connection in their upstream route is not the same.

Consider your page weight

Fact is, approximately 30% of Internet users are still on a dial-up connections. The "page weight" is the number of bytes a page contains. All of those bytes must download to the visitor's browser to view. Some designers are only allowing (building) for broadband connections, if they consider anything at all, and you may loose business ($$) from having large, heavy web pages. Please be aware of this. If possible, view your website on a dial-up connection and notice the loading time. On the other hand, you can benefit from this same situation. Build your site to accommodate dial-up users and you can take sales away from sites that don't.

Think and make money

There are many little things to know and tricks for creating good, productive websites. Many of these things are not obvious, some are, if you look close. Most very large companies go the effort to be sure their site is right. That is part of the reason they get most of the business. A small business site can have the same advantage, if one takes the time to think and plan.

Myths about hosting

The 'up time guarrantee' illusion

Many site owners and other advisers suggest comparing a host's up time guarantee. That doesn't work and here's why. First, an up time guarantee is only a statement that may not be accurate. Second, up time only indicates that the web server is functional, without consideration for cracker/hacker conflicts, service failures due to server overloading, connection/bandwidth congestion or other things causing lack of availability of your website. Such problems are common elsewhere. A host could achieve 100% up time and still yield poor service.

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