Choosing the right Hosting and Cloud management company is one of the most difficult business decisions a lot of business organizations would have had to make. Considering the flack and pricey scheme used to lure companies and an industry that seems uncontrolled. A bad decision could easily jeopardize business standards and information.
Many entrepreneurs in cyberspace are quickly re-learning Newton’s law of gravity. But this time around it’s not an apple falling, it’s their website. As a long-time veteran of cyberspace I had nearly forgotten the consequences of a fallen web site. Recently, I had the occasion to experience this nightmare and learn the valuable lessons that accompany it.
If you think it can’t happen to you, think again. (Many of my woes were avoidable, but I got sloppy. (I promise to explain how YOU can learn from my mistakes in a minute .)
You see, like many of you right now, I thought I was safe. I went with one of the larger web hosting companies. They promised daily backups. They promised 99% uptime – even guaranteed it.
Promises are made to be broken…
A website owned by a major client was lost. When it is down, income stops. One time to learn how cold and lonely cyberspace is, is when your website is dead. Not only are these times lonely, lengthy periods with a dead website can be very costly.
Take it. The grand tally from the recent outage totaled well into thousands of rands in lost revenue. Not a big deal for a large corporation, but for a home-based or entrepreneur business, it’s a figure not to be taken lightly.
Keeping up with Most companies who are going paperless and Keeping up with paper work, clients and a website full of information is something huge. These company’s dealings will require a hosting company that makes work seamlessly easy and automotive, but hosting companies have for years being one of the hardest cons of owning a company that solely depends on cloud and IT technicians to operate.
As an owner of 4 IT outlets, i have taken 4 years of my professional years to test and try companies in and out of South Africa and all these points :
Deciding on the right Host provider
It is hard to decide on the right hosting company when we try to save the very moment we hear of a discount or free package add-ons, sometimes there are even no payment for a year offers but what is usually the catch.
May of these companies are making up for defects or making less business obvious and when these prices are compared to professional hosting companies you start to realise that companies that work on sales medium are targeting volume and will fail in keeping up with quality service. So, cheap is not always the best way to go.
Try checking compliments against complaints on the net before you sign up.
Ensuring they deliver on promise
Sometimes promises are actually more than delivery for most of the local host companies and 8 – 5 is not a time slot for hosting companies. Many of these companies give you nice packages at very cheap prices but offer no service at all,.,waiting 24hours for reply or calling and waiting on a call for 4hours is as good as no service and this is where the volume to quality tricks catches on with some host companies. Make a call to a
Waiting 24hours for a reply or calling and waiting on a call for 4hours is as good as no service and this is where the volume to quality tricks catch on with most hosting providers.
Make a call to a hosting company you are considering or a live chat and calculate response time before you sign up.
Receiving Adequate Support
Adequate support is actually the strongest point that made me leave a lot of these vulture companies. Nothing sadness a customer more than the statement ” I am not sure ” or ” i do not know” and here are paid techs that we some times have to tell what to do. II will not mention names for corporate
I will not mention names for corporate reasons, but many of the host companies are at fault with these points.
Ensure you deal with the first incidence properly or rather migrate to another hosting company immediately or you will have to deal with such issues over time, and it is frustrating.
Migrating on maturity
On maturity as it is called or when your company has eventually grown and managed to secure its own hosting service or server, how easy would it be to migrate from your present host company? Now that is a million dollar question. I reached this stage and when
Now that is a million rand question. I reached this stage and when I was moving my domains from a well know hosting company, I was charged renewal fee for all the domains and am talking about 56 domains.
It was more costly to move than it cost to register.
So always read the terms and conditions before you sign up.
Basically if any customer requests we make big changes to an account or remove a duplicate we backup both or all before we make changes and keep it for one week. Once we noticed that the main account disappeared as well we immediately restore the backup and wait a few minutes before action completes. We also have server backups daily as well. – Dane (Host king)
This was a statement from a notable company that offers incredible service and after an incidence that left my clients data obsolete, the IT tech on the project delivered as promised, it was just as if he made magic in a box.
