Choosing the Right Host

With the internet a booming economy even given the difficult economy locally, its more important than ever to have a reliable online web presence. Unfortunately web hosting can be a confusing place with just as many sharks as there are reputable provider.

Today I will cover some of the very basics for making sure you select a reputable provider and how you can know that you are getting what you pay for and not dealing with a company that might be gone tomorrow.

Customer support, or customer failure?
A good web host has good customer and technical support departments. People often believe that if their web host offers 24/7 support, their support is good. Often, this is not the case. Why? Put it this way; would you like to be working a night shift with your eyes droopy, speech slurred with tiredness, working on fixing someone’s hosting account or server? More to the point, would you like this person working on your services? Thought not!

Almost all web hosts that feature 24/7 support will outsource this, usually from a foreign country. It seems a great idea to always have someone to talk to when you have questions or problems – but outsourced support departments often don’t even know the products they are selling/supporting and have very little knowledge other than scripts in front of them.

Outsourced support teams often leave the customer with more problems than they initially had and are rarely of any real help at all.

This is not to say all web hosts who feature 24/7 support have theirs outsourced – but it does pay to check! ZOL Zimbabwe has a fully local 24/7 support team and performance is regularly reviewed and checked and staff rotate so they are not always on night duty – ZOL looks after its support staff to make sure none of the common negatives of nighttime support occur.

Hosting provider vs. hosting reseller
Is your web host a top-level provider, with their own servers and/or hardware in a data centre, or is your web host buying and reselling from another provider? Whilst there’s absolutely nothing wrong with most reseller web hosts, with some of whom giving better value and support than “leading” providers, it can lead to a brick wall in time.

If your web host is a reseller of another company, this tells you they are not serious about web hosting. This usually means web hosting is not one of their “core” services, but an add-on or extra to generate revenue. This is fine, but if your web host’s main line of work dries up and they suddenly go bankrupt, say goodbye to your web site and all of your data.

It is wise to choose a “real” web host who have their own dedicated servers to host your web sites. This tells you the web host is serious about providing good and reliable hosting services, usually this gets you better value services, and gives you the peace of mind that your web host is focussing solely on hosting thus your web sites and data are safer.

ZOL owns and runs its own DataCenter and is in 100% control of the whole experience – you can be confident that your site is safe with us

How about “unlimited” web hosting?
Since there’s no such thing as unlimited sized hard disk drives, unlimited speed CPU’s and unlimited Internet uplinks, is there really such a thing as unlimited hosting? As much as we’d like to say yes, unfortunately there’s always a limit.
Web hosts who provide “unlimited” web space and/or bandwidth packages have two main types of customers; those who know very little about web hosting and think “unlimited” is good whilst using minimal resources, then those who know exactly what they are doing and abuse the service with lots of data storage and transfer.

The latter often results in web hosting providers imposing fair/acceptable usage policies limiting how much of your “unlimited” services you can use. Let’s face it – do you really want to be with a web host that mis-sells and lies about their products?

ZOL doesn’t offer unlimited hosting packages for this exact reason – we favour letting you know exactly how much you are using and how much space you have left so there are no nasty surprises.

National or International – does it matter?
Does it matter that you or your business is based in one country, but your web host is based in another? You might not think so, but it does matter to your visitors and the search engines. Google and Bing have been degrading web sites’ value in search engines for a while now if they are not hosted in their proprietary country.

The reason for this is simple; the greater the distance between your visitors and your web host, the slower the speed and the higher the ‘latency’(or wait time). If your web site isn’t loading fast enough for your primary visitors, not only will they leave your site and go elsewhere, but the search engines will downrank you because of this.

You should always ensure that your web host is hosting your web site in your own country. Larger web hosts will run servers in multiple countries / locations, sometimes spread over continents, so this shouldn’t be a problem for them to move you. If you’re with a smaller or independent host who aren’t hosting your web site in your own country, you should consider switching web hosts.

Having a local presence is all the more critical in Zimbabwe, the unfortunate downside of being a landlocked country means that we are reliant on external providers for fibre access, and while Liquid Telecom is making excellent progress at laying fibre throughout the continent, fibre breaks and faults occur often and if your website is not in the country – many customers won’t be able to reach the site

ZOL runs all of its hosting in Zimbabwe with external DNS services for added reliability – you can be certain that your website is hosted locally if you pick ZOL and will get the optimum speeds for your customers. Google should also rank your site better locally as a result.

THE AUTHOR: Anthony is a Senior Systems Engineer for ZOL Zimbabwe, day to day he keeps all of the ZOL systems running, many of which help to make internet access working for ZOL customers. He previously lived in the UK and consulted for many large e-commerce companies on the hosting and technical sides. Anthony is married with two young children and in his spare time enjoys watching Formula 1 or any kind of motorsport and cooking/braai-ing