What do you guys look for in a Web Host? [Archive] - Entrepreneur Forum for Australian Small Business

jam

11-04-08, 05:00 PM

I'm currently looking at starting a small webhost.

It's actually a uni assignment but ill prob keep it going for 2 years or so and finish with some kind of exit strategy.

What I am wondering is what do you guys look for in a web host?
Everything will be hosting in Australia.

Do you go for cheap, no frills?
What do you look for? High Bandwidth? Lot of space?

justinsigns

13-04-08, 09:40 AM

I look for stability and support, this would outweigh the cost as 70% of our business comes from the web.

Carl Taylor

13-04-08, 10:15 AM

Hi Jam its great to see you researching the marketplace before starting the business.

Your already ahead of most business owners.

I reccomend you also ask this question on some web hosting forums, but also you could think about finding a niche, for example only hosting specifically for a piece of software ie there are hosts that are just for joomla, the servers are optimised for running joomla. Once you find that niche ask the people who are in that niche what they want from a host.

Also once you have your feedback dont just take that, see if you can innovate on that feedback, make your hosting a "PURPLE COW" read Seth Godins Purple Cow (http://www.carltaylor.com.au/index.php/Library/Business/Purple-Cow.html) to learn more about what this means.

Good luck.

PS. I look for features and support from my web host.

Brendan

14-04-08, 06:15 PM

Hey jam,

I actually run a small boutique web host, I have found that what my clients want is top notch support, they want to be able to have access to someone either via live support, over the phone or via email and get a response quickly.

Features such as spam prevention, web mail, statistics, and built in scripts are becoming increasingly popular also, so as a web host you need to provide these for your clients.

If you only have a two year plan, then as part of your exit strategy you must think of your clients and how they are going to be treated.. if you will be migrating them to a new host or just selling your company then work out how you are going to deal with the sites hosted on your servers.

Any further questions, feel free to ask.

jam

15-04-08, 06:42 PM

Its seems like support is the way to becoming a good host.

What is a great way to pull customers, and what do you think is the best way to advertise for a hosting business?

Would you guys be willing to put a small add, say something around 100x50 pixels for discounted hosting?

As it is a uni project I'm thinking of offering a discount to full time uni students.

rosshill

18-04-08, 01:00 PM

Support quality and response time is #1.

Slade

18-04-08, 06:48 PM

Yep, support is definatley number one!

I am currently waiting on a reply from a hosting company that I put in 3 days ago and have still had no response, I would love to change hosts but I can't for a few reasons.

HWT

20-06-08, 12:35 PM

Support and stability and speed.

Have used sites in the past with huge bandwidth and storage limits but their database access time was soooooo sloooooooooooooow it made my site run like frozen treacle, and back then barely 10% of the site was database backed, which says a lot for how bad the hosting was. Host was Servage btw, please to be avoiding it like the plague unless you have an extremely low traffic site or you just host huge files with no scripting.

Very happy with my current host, thinking of signing up as a reseller once we launch the current idea. They are not in Australia though.

ecomm

11-05-09, 10:12 AM

guys,

I have been working with an Australian hosting company for the last 3 years. They started off fairly small and now host over 500 domains and websites globally.

Hosting has become very much a commodity. Domain names and hosting plans come pre packaged with many 'goodies' such as OOB ecommerce sites, easy Wordpress installation through Fantastico etc. At the corporate end you have Virtual Private Hosting.

What's important in this industry is following the market trends and consumer needs - e.g. during the recent times it is cloud computing (office online - e.g. MS Exchange web hosting and Sharepoint portals) and infrastructure consolidation through virtualisation. This means having the necessary infrastructure and know how to keep up with ever changing technology..

Customer service and response times is critical to retaining customers going forward..

cheers,

ecomm

------------------------------------
Application Development & Consulting - Application Development | Business Process Outsourcing | Atcomm Enterprises (http://www.atcomm.com.au)
Web Design - Star Web Design | Web Design | Web Development | Flash Presentations | Corporate Identity | Graphics Design | PHP | ASP.NET | FLASH (http://www.starwebdesign.com.au)
Web Hosting - Fast Hosting | cheap web hosting | ecommerce web hosting | real estate web site hosting | web site hosting (http://www.fasthosting.com.au)

Bennett

02-03-10, 10:05 PM

Web hosting is basically a service given by companies who provide space on the servers. The server is usually owned by the company and they provide space on it for their clients wishing to put themselves on the internet. There are many such companies who provide hosting services. You can get a lot more details on web hosting on the net. And not only that you can also get a list of SEO Hosting (http://www.seowebhosting.net/) companies too.

one

03-03-10, 09:35 AM

Stability, speed and support, in that order. Some users will probably have different priorities depending on their individual needs.

seocourse

05-03-10, 10:52 PM

I run over 400 sites... so in my case, I need 24 hour support, the only company that offers me a chat/phone suppor 24/7/365 is hostgator in the US....

amisha12

10-03-10, 04:10 PM

Hostgator is the best and sufficient in all ways.

HWT

14-05-10, 05:00 PM

We're in the market for a new hosting plan and still looking for the same things.

- Enough bandwidth
- Enough disk space
- NO LAG - quality of service is essential
- support people who reply is nice but this seems to be pretty universal

And preferably costing less than the sites raise in revenue but I can go a few $100 over for a short time.

3DFOX3D

15-07-10, 01:41 PM

I tend to agree with most posters comments but let me add my 2 cents worth. Much candepend on how many sites you want hosted. For most people or organizations it is probably just one or a few tops. There is a niche for Domainers - check out some domaining forums. I am a Domainer, I currently have 6 sites hosted by a quality host with great support etc (they also have my sites registration business, some 1,800 names, so I guess they have to look after me.) BUT - it is my intention to do some link farming / vertical web marketing by making some of my lesser quality names live sites within a category where I have a super duper name site and have those 6 or so lesser sites "feed" my main site - in this case I don't need quality support, I need cheap - if one of my feeders was to go offline for a while then it is not critical whereas the same ca't be said for the main site. e.g. I can host 100 feeder sites for $500/month using a GoDaddy type of host for example compared to the quality host I am now using which for 100 sites would cost me about $3000.

So there are many different market expectations for hosts.

Good luck in your venture - when it is up and running let me know - I might be able to put some business your way :)

cheers, Mike

3DFOX3D

15-07-10, 01:53 PM

seocourse - are they all your sites or are you sub hosting? what does HostGator charge you per site per month? I have heard some good reports about them. So how often do you need 24hr phone support. I figure I am asleep for say 8 hours during the night - one of my sites goes down for a while whilst I am asleep or is down when I wake up having gone down whilst I was asleep - I contact my host here in Australia to sort the problem - it is working hours here, they are awake, at work - why would I need 24 hour phone support ? 9-5 7days/week is serviceable don't you think? Or do you have some sort of alarm system in your puter that alerts you to one of your sites going offline and hence waking you? if so is such a program readily available, where can I get it? It may give me the confidence to host offshore. Serious here.

cheers,

Hampers

15-07-10, 07:51 PM

Hi
have am basically converted to hostgator but have been swayed by the idea of having a local host...

Does it have an impact on search results if your host is in the same region?

Currently my host identifies as Melbourne; Is it preferable to be localised or is it less of a concern to the big three of

speed, response time and price?

HWT

19-08-10, 04:34 PM

Hostgator looks interesting and they have a nice cheap $19 plan, but they have 20mbit connection not 100 like I've seen on some hosts ... anyone find this makes a difference? For an extra $20 a month other hosts have 100mbit ...

I'm running close to the end of my little holiday and need to get back to work so I need to seriously start shopping for a new host :)

Babycarseats

22-09-10, 04:00 PM

after a painful growing period i have come to the following requirements, support of htaccess. not limited in mysql db's bandwidth is not such a concern any more unless, prefernce now is for cpanel then plesk and completly stay away from helm server control panels, if someone has multiple c class ips hosting then all the better

however possibly more important for an ecomm sites is uptime and the support your get in resolving probs

HWT

22-09-10, 05:07 PM

We're moving hosts right now - one website to go and they're all across.

New host seems pretty good, much more responsive than their old one. Only $US46 a month which is not too bad. Pain to set up all the webserver settings, ftp accounts, email etc but if we got a managed account we'd be paying a fair bit more.

We'll see how it goes.

3DFOX3D

22-09-10, 07:04 PM

Hi Guys,
I have recently checked a few things out about hosting that might be worthwhile noting - Residency was one potential issue - I asked the question whether hosting a site in the country target market had an affect on Google rankings, e.g. me having a dot com site targeting the U.S. market but hosted here in Oz. Apparently it has no bearing other than loading speed of the site - Google will rank higher the faster loading of two otherwise equally ranked sites, so a server in the U.S. should load a site up quicker than in Australia (but not necessarily for the U.K., Botswana etc.). So for an AU site there is an advantage in having a local AU host from a loading speed viewpoint. You are probably aware that Google WebMaster Tools has crawl stats which includes loading time - I was continually getting suggestions from Google to download a site speed tool which I have now done.
It is potentially a splitting hairs factor however if it meant the difference between page 1 and 3 it could be a valid issue. Of course that is for dot com because in the U.S. they do not have a regional version engine. Where we have a Google AU there is a ranking adjustment for AU pages and the speed loading factor would be a common denominator. Speed of loading is from the host server as I understand it.
So it appears that it makes sense to have AU sites hosted in Australia - residency of hosting dot coms is subjective.

HWT - $46/month for ?? what are you getting for your money? - is that Host Gator?

cheers,
Mike

HWT

22-09-10, 07:32 PM

Its a VPS. We get 20G disk space (a lot of that disappears on the OS though), 1 processor, 1G ram, 1Gps connectivity, 200G traffic. Its with SoftSys. We've still got the largest site to move so I couldn't say how good it is for the entire site load yet, but for the sites we've moved so far it is very fast.

newman

22-09-10, 11:00 PM

Also have a VPS - I pay a bit for it, 70gb space, 140gb traffic, 1.5gb ram, runs pretty well and haven't had too many issues - web24. Always hard to find a good host so it's always worth looking around and getting recommendations from friends, colleagues etc.

HWT

23-09-10, 10:41 AM

Ah, web24 is an Australian host - explains the prices :)

We went with SoftSys because they were a Microsoft recommended hosting partner for Website Sparks (which we intend to join very soon) and I had a look at review sites and so forth and they had a very good rating. I'm a member of a forum where they give out a 'half price first month' deal every few days so we took that up for the first month where there was overlap between old and new host.

I'm working on a new website that we'll launch under the Website Sparks TOS, obviously being a Microsoft sponsored thing we had to pick a Windows host.

newman

23-09-10, 10:52 AM

100 sites for $500 a month seems a lot to me - I have VPS and can create as many sites as I like... I've 70gb of space so could easily set up few hundred simple feeder sites all for about $100 a month.

HWT

23-09-10, 12:41 PM

Yeah, VPSs are great. We have about 6 sites on ours.

Previous host was virtual shared, we had the same 6 sites there for about $30 a month but it was getting really unresponsive, and I had some database access timeouts. At the peak on the old host we were dealing with about 150,000 hits a day so far beyond a shared virtual account. I'm impressed they didn't kick us off.

Web Circle

18-10-10, 04:48 PM

Hi Jam check out Web Hosting Talk Australia or Whirlpool forums. WHT is the Australian version of the US site and it has a forum just for running a hosting business and there are loads of questions similar to this and great discussion about starting and running a hosting business. Look out for the haters, there are some grizzly people in the industry. Its a very very competitive field, it would be a good challenge for you.

dontbedumb

23-11-10, 07:51 AM

Stability and support.
If your page is down three times a day, you'll understand what i mean :)

stevenhudson

01-12-10, 11:43 AM

Up time on the net and customer support. I use Crazy Domains they tick all the boxes for me.

happydevas

12-12-10, 01:41 AM

Today, even small web sites seem to have a database in the back. You want to make sure that you can use the database type that you feel comfortable. Most web servers today offer MySQL is probably enough for most people, but if you prefer PostsgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, or other flavor, do not settle for less. Remember, if it is not advertising, you probably did not foresee.

NetOrigin

27-12-10, 04:38 AM

I might be bias here but if i was to look for a web host to host my business, i'd be looking a host that offers real 24/7 customer support (Say i send an email or support ticket to them at 1AM in the morning, i'd expect to get a response <2 hours), 99.9% guaranteed uptime and an SLA (Service Level Agreement).

The term "Unlimited" disk space and/or bandwidth is something to look out for. These type of hosts are simply overselling server resources. They could be placing too many users on the one server for example.

HWT

06-01-11, 01:00 PM

We hit some issues with our new host's stats package using too much CPU causing lag and had to change a bunch of settings to get us back to how we were when we first joined.

Now we know how important CPU is it has jumped to the top of our list of things to look for in a webhost - good CPU timeslice management for now, nice grunty CPUs *plural* in the future.

Their highest plan is 2 quad core 12G ram computers with a terabyte of disk space each for $400 a month so I think we'll be with them until we outgrow something like that, which I honestly can't see happening any time soon unless one of our sites really takes off.

mjones2011

03-03-11, 04:59 AM

To be honest I look for large bandwidth and storage space. But of course, this depends on your business requirements.

kfc

11-03-11, 01:35 PM

Definitely Good Support. There are often times when you have technical issues and you need someone who can help you without them make you feel as if you're a burden. Hostgator are very good with customer support. And they let you have multiple domains on the same account

Anthony

05-05-11, 06:42 PM

Web hosting is a good business but when you provide the complete solutions tyo the client. When client need some domain and hosting look for the Good Bandwidth, Speed and online support high can provide support to them

HWT

05-05-11, 07:54 PM

We're up to $65pm for hosting now. People look at us like we have two heads when we say what we pay for hosting. But if we pay less, the sites run really, really slowly, so a cheaper plan is not really an option.

pink_briefcase

06-07-11, 04:17 PM

We always commit mistakes and wrong decisions when starting an online business because it is after all, a continuing learning process. Committing these business mistakes is one way of learning a lesson and avoiding these things from happening ever again. In fact, even successful businessmen and entrepreneurs have failed at least once in their lives.

famous business lawsuits
www.toughbiz.com

crismarie

14-10-11, 12:06 PM

Some people call the web hosting service the site’s technical backbone, so choose carefully the first time, as moving to a new host can turn into a big headache.

Bennett

18-11-11, 11:37 PM

In fully managed hosting plan, your website will be monitored by experienced webmasters on a regularly basis. Simply put, you don't have to worry about server downtimes and other technical issues. All you need is to pay and then receive updates from your managed hosting provider. You can sit back and enjoy!!

IM Today

19-11-11, 06:51 PM

Uptime and good support are probably the two most important elements for my business. I always advise that you buy the best plan possible if it's affordable to do so. Although switching plans isn't too big a hassle, you're always going to need a fairly expansive plan if you're serious about making money online and there's definitely a positive psychological element of trying to get the best out of a superior hosting package. It actually used to drive me to get more sites up, and getting one of the better hosting plans definitely worked in my favour.

OnefortheMoney

21-11-11, 08:01 PM

Definitely support.

I outsource my websites now to people who can do a better job than I can, but I built my own when I started out. Without the support I received from Hostgator (and I know they have their critics, but I think they are excellent), I'd have never got the first site off the ground. I have used others, but the response I get from Hostgator is usually the best. They also gave me superb support when my traffic started to exceed my bandwidth and helped to put me onto a superior plan at a great price.