I Love The Smell Of Burnt Silicon In The Morning
Any new business startup website must strike a balance between keeping costs down and maintaining a website that can cope with security problems, traffic spikes and other obstacles further down the road.
Choosing your host is one of the most important decisions you will make.
Take the time to do some research. Find out what you need now, and are likely to need 12 months down the road. Ask yourself what your clients or customers will expect in terms of performance. OK, there’s a lot of other factors too but right now concentrate on those which can influence your hosting decision.
Here’s the thing – if your pages take too long to load that’s a massive barrier to achieving a fully indexed site. Indexing spiders from search engines are likely to “time-out” if the site is too slow to index properly. I’ve seen examples of this and the results are not pretty.
Using Google’s ‘cached’ link I once predicted a server hardware failure from an indexing anomaly. Within a week the server had died, causing massive headaches for the (extremely terrible it must be said) hosting company.
Speaking to a tech specialist who works at a large UK hosting company, he told me a lot about what goes on in the industry. No matter what space you rent, he said, the host company knows that most people don’t use the majority of it. When you crunch the numbers, there’s a lot of money to be made in all that extra space that’s being unused.
If you’re interested in checking the speed of a site, visit Alexa.com and enter a few URLs in the search box. Under the site stats section you’ll find the relevant info.
You should be aiming for your site to load at least 10% faster than your competitors.
If you are looking for a host on the cheap, don’t be surprised if the search engines don’t look as favourably on you as they could. Not forgetting that people don’t hang around for webpages that are slow to load.
You wouldn’t buy a Ford Fiesta and expect it perform like a BMW M3 now would you?
