The single most important thing when choosing a web host

So, you’ve got your new website written, picked your domain name and you’re ready to go. All you need to now is pick your host – but there are thousands out there!

The prime question to ask, is what do you want from a good host. There are a number of aspects to the service that hosts provide, but there’s one that’s far and away more important than anything else;

Site Load Time

Web users are notoriously impatient. If a page doesn’t start to load immediately they hit the back button and try something else. There’s plenty of evidence of this, in case your own behaviour isn’t enough to convince you that everyone else is the same;

Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20% (Linden 2006).

Tests at Amazon revealed similar results: every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1% (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007).

When I was using Mochahost, the average response time (time until the first byte is sent) was 0.8 seconds, so I was getting a big bounce rate even from customers who’s keyword search would have found them exactly what they wanted on my site – but of course they didn’t know that and they didn’t wait around to find out.
One of my more successful hosts is webhostsuk who have an average response time of 0.299 seconds. Of course its important to keep your page light (these days most users will have some form of broadband so its not unreasonable to have your landing page as much as 500kb, but I like to keep them right down at 100-200kb if I can) so its will load quickly once the host has responded.

How to measure the performance of your website host

Google Analytics

Once you’ve got your site up and running, its essential that you measure its performance. The thing I don’t want to see is people typing on-topic keywords that mean they’d be interested in my site, they click on my link but then bounce away before the page loads. That’s a potential customer lost, right there, because of page load time.
Google analytics will show you all of this information, and what’s more its free.

Pingdom stats

If you sign up with pingdom, they’ll give you extensive stats on uptime and response time for your website. Unfortunately they don’t publish anyone else’s results so you can’t use it to compare hosts you don’t use. Checking any sites you have provides a useful benchmark though.

Other features to consider when choosing your host

Length of contract

Most hosting packages are much cheaper if you pay up front for 2 years plus, but you won’t want that if the service you get is poor. The ideal is a host who will let you have a short contract, and upgrade to a longer one when it runs out, assuming of course you’ve been happy with your site load times.

Bandwidth.

The first question of course, is much will be enough – you don’t want to run out, but you don’t want to pay for more than necessary.

Bandwidth = number of page views x size of page, but if you’re setting up a site for the first time, you probably don’t  know how many visitors you’re going to get, so the bandwidth you need is hard to estimate. I’ve tended to buy too much for fear of begin short, but its dumb really because any host will let you upgrade if you’re bumping into your limit. In fact they’ll start offering upgrades as soon as you get near your limit.
One thing that’s for sure, bandwidth is not unlimited. A host may claim that bandwidth is unlimited, but all that really means is that there’s no hard cut off where your page stops loading because your contracted bandwidth is used up. Unlimited suppliers can often overload their servers, so that your visitors get a slow service at peak times – or more likely the access time rises and potential visitors never actually see your site. For this reason many people say that limited bandwidth services are better than unlimited. I say its neither here nor there – all you need to know is average access time, but as we know, that’s difficult to know until you’ve signed up and used the service.

Reseller Vs orginal host

There are a lot of web hosting companies out there, and most of them offer re-seller accounts. That’s where people can set up their own ‘web host’ and sell the products of the parent company. I’d advise doing your homework and not signing up with a re-seller – they tend not to be around for so long, and there can be real problems with getting support quickly…or at all.

Windows or Linux server

Certainly don’t make the mistake of thinking because your pc runs windows your server needs to, because it doesn’t matter at all from a user point of view. The basic pluses and minus are;
Linux probably runs a bit quicker and is more stable
Some scripts only run under windows, but unless you use them in your page code it won’t matter
Linux hosting is cheaper because its open-source software.
All in all, it really doesn’t matter that much, but I’d say Linux is the natural default choice.

Uptime

Uptime. How much of the time is your page available to potential visitors, and how much time is it unavailable? Nearly all hosts offer 99.9% uptime, so you could be forgiven for thinking it won’t make much difference who you choose. However, they all have their own definitions of what constitutes downtime. For instance, one of my hosts made some changes to their system that meant it wouldn’t run some of the scripts my site was running. This meant no-one could access my site for 18 hours until I noticed. They said this wasn’t downtime because their servers were up and running that the time. Another trick is how long a system has to be down before its counted, and some hosts use this to exclude short outtages from their stats. Also they normally don’t include planned maintenance and pretty much anything else they can predict.


One host or many?

The last issue to consider if you have more than one site is whether to use the same host or different ones. Personally I like to use different ones because if one goes out of business or has a server failure, at least all my sites aren’t affected at the same time. On the other hand, its probably a bit cheaper to keep them all together and you may like to feel you’ve built up a relationship with your supplier – although unless you are a major customer, they probably won’t feel the same way.