Fundamentals: Hosting

A good developer will hold your hand through choosing a hosting provider. Many developers will have hosting partners, or even maintain their own hosting servers. It’s always nice to have an all in one provider, but it’s even nicer to partner with a specialist. If your developer is running servers as a sideline business, you may consider choosing a company that is a dedicated hosting provider.

You should strongly consider choosing a hosting provider that is at the top of the food chain. Really large providers often have redundancy, and feature sets that can’t be approached by smaller companies.

Hosting is a world full of acronyms and terminology. You will likely come up against a bullet point list that’s full of unfamiliar terms. It can be very difficult to do effective value comparisons if you don’t know what you’re comparing. If you are not fortunate enough to have an I.T department to help you make these determinations, you may have to go it alone.

Until you find out how much demand your site will experience, avoid getting locked into long term contracts. If things go well, your site will outgrow its’ first home quickly. Start with a hosting package that seems reasonable and that you are convinced will provide you adequate customer service.

Things to say to a developer

• How do you currently handle most of your clients’ hosting?
• Can you help me to transfer my existing site to a new server until my development is complete?
• Will you handle email setups, domain transfers, SSL, and other features of my hosting for me?
• What is your standard billing rate for these things?
• Explain a time when your current hosting solution was inadequate for one of your clients, and you were able to quickly create a new solution.
• Illustrate a time when you were able to create value for a client due to a change in their business, or a change in their traffic. Explain how re-evaluation of hosting created value…