What Your Web Host Should Bring to the Party Support

What Your Web Host Should Bring to the Party
Support, scalability, and cost are all important factors when choosing a service for your site -- far more so than just the lowest price

Q: Can you give me some idea how a small business should choose its Web- hosting service? Should Web hosting be included as part of the development cost when an information system is being purchased?

---- Justyn Ip, Hong Kong ,from :businessweek.com

A: Unless you're planning to purchase your own servers (an expensive proposition when hardware, software, and personnel are taken into account), you will need a Web-hosting service to take your company online. The cost of that service should indeed be included as part of your development costs for an overall information system, experts say.

So much for the easy part of your question. Going about choosing a Web- hosting service gets a little more complicated. Price is important, of course, but it shouldn't be your only consideration. Companies that offer Web hosting extremely cheaply -- or for free -- have to be offsetting their costs in some way, whether by skimping on customer service, technical support, maintaining consistently operational servers, or relying on heavy banner advertising that will slow down your site's loading time.

Experts recommend that you comparison shop: Get quotes on monthly fees and ask how much space those fees will buy. "If you have any kind of streaming media [video or music], expect to pay a higher premium. If the site is unusually large, the fee will also be higher," says Valerie Shavers, the creative director of Studio 8, a Los Angeles Web-site design firm.

The going rates for Web-hosting services range from $20 to $50 a month, with one-time setup fees between $25 to $75, says Bernadette Williams, a Beverly Hills (Calif.) Internet strategist and president of i-strategy.com. Her checklist of features that should be offered by good Web-hosting services:

* Use of your registered domain name as your Web-site address. "This is typically not available with free Web space," Williams says.

* "POP" accounts, which allow your e-mail addresses to use your domain name, as in: yourname@yourcompany.com.

* Access to 24-hour technical support, preferably by telephone as well as online.

* At least 98% "up-time," meaning that the server will not go offline, rendering the Web site inaccessible, more than 2% of the time.

* Unlimited site traffic.

* Access to CGI scripts, which allow you to process online response forms.

* A secure server, so you can accept credit-card orders on your site.

* Regular detailed statistics (in raw data form or by report) that tell you what your page views are, where your visitors are coming from, how long they're staying, and other valuable information.

Jeanne Schaaf, a senior analyst in Forrester Research's telecom division, advises that you choose a service that has multiple geographic locations to provide redundancy, in case a disaster wipes out the data in one location for a period of time. She also advises looking for a service that can scale your site up or down to accommodate seasonal peaks and dips in business. "If you're a brand-new e-tailer and your site takes off at holiday time, will your host scale it up rapidly, if that's what is required?" she asks. Pick a service that offers a sophisticated platform for e-commerce or systems networks, and a vision for what will be available online in the future, she adds.

Getting a clear picture of what your Web-hosting service will provide, and exactly how much it will cost, is essential. "There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in this industry, and small businesses are not the only ones who find it very confusing. Big companies are confused, too," Schaaf says. When you talk to a Web-hosting representative, he or she should thoroughly articulate what the company is going to do for you, not throw around vague tech terms that obfuscate the issue.

ONLINE RESOURCES. For instance, a service contract may include Web-site monitoring, but you need to define what "monitoring" really means. Will they be monitoring the site's performance from the inside only, or will they be doing the more valuable service of monitoring your end-users' experience? If they say they're going to offer you "reporting," does that mean they will give you real- time statistics about traffic on your site, or will you have to pay for copies of the data once in a while?

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