When Web Hosts Fail: What You Need to Know

Millions of web site owners found out the hard way on September 10th, when their web sites were down and unavailable for most of the day after an outage of epic proportions hit the well-known domain and web hosting firm GoDaddy. Reuters noted that the wide-ranging outage impacted some of the 10 million users of GoDaddy’s web services, including RunningShoes.com, which said its site was down sporadically during the day. The outage reportedly caused them losses of about $50,000 in sales as potential customers clicked to another site.

Most business owners sink a good amount of budget funds into getting a secure, reliable and fast-loading web presence for their site. And when a server overload, technical snafu or network malfeasance occurs, then web sites do not appear. That’s the unfortunate part of being on the web, when technical issues far away or regionally close can affect website performance and stability. 

So what can business owners do to prevent this type of outage to their sites? Unfortunately, nothing is fail safe in web hosting, but companies should double check the list below to see if they’ve handled the basic parts correctly.

What Type of Hosting is Critical to Your Site?

Your site has specific needs for its operation. If you’re selling clothing materials all day long, you’ll need plenty of web firepower in load times, image renderings and more to keep your site at the top of the search rankings and review sites. Dig around for well-known web hosting companies, but be prepared to shell out significant monthly fees to these web hosts.

Lifehacker offers up some name brand web hosts that might help get you started in your search, or you might want to simply choose a better-priced VPS hosting plan alternative that gives you often as much as the leading web host companies.

Is the Web Host Right for Your Site?

Is your web site a much-trafficked daily news site with lots of video loads and image renderings? Perhaps you’re offering art downloads and need massive amounts of storage for data transfer to your customers. If so, you’ll need a strong web hosting plan with plenty of bandwidth and storage capabilities. Seek out plans that offer gigabytes of storage and good backup possibilities.

Does Your Web Host Offer a Backup Plan for Outages?

Clearly, if GoDaddy can have an internal issue that affects many web site users, then any host firm can suffer an outage. What matters most is how a web host offers a strategy to limit damage or downtime from an outage. That’s the crucial part of a web host company choice. 

Make sure a web hosting company’s claims matches its actual service work. A web host might guarantee 99.9 percent uptime, but that guarantee may be nowhere in the small print of the contract. Check for any compensation to web site owners if the web host doesn’t match its terms of service. A guarantee without compensation is worthless.

Double checking these areas of your own web sites right now can help lead to better web host choices in the future. Always take time to weigh your options and only settle for best services you can find.