Choosing a Web Host

How should you choose a web host?

We're not saying that we are the best web hosts for any situation. Our business is not built on the model of providing cheap hosting to tens of thousands of clients. In fact if you want the cheapest hosting available, we are not the people to speak to. However, in an article on Site Wizard the most important factor in choosing a commercial web host is...

Reliability and speed of access

Over the last two years we have experienced 99.99% uptime - and our downtime was scheduled upgrades

Not only should the web host be reliable and fast, it should guarantee its uptime (the time when it is functional). Look for a minimum uptime of 99%. In fact, even 99% is actually too low - it really should be 99.5% or higher. The host should provide some sort of refund (eg prorated refund or discount) if it falls below that figure. Note though that guarantees are often hard to enforce from your end - the host usually requires all sorts of documentation. However, without that guarantee, the web host will have little incentive to ensure that its servers are running all the time.

Reliable Hosting

You may like to read the rest of this article about choosing commercial and free web hosting solutions before considering us. However, let us point out though that in each of the last two years we have experienced approximately 40 minutes of downtime. Now considering that in both cases, the downtime was scheduled as part of our upgrade timetable and took place between 2 and 4 a.m. we think that's pretty reliable. Over 99.99% actually.

Fast Access

Because our hosting platform uses Rackspace Data Centres we benefit from their ultra fast network. This has been engineered from the ground up to accommodate the high availability demands of mission-critical web applications. The Cisco-powered, zero-downtime network with unique self-healing attributes is based on multiple bandwidth providers for best case routing and guarnateed fast access. We don't use Rackspace for our hosting infrastucture because they are the cheapest, but because they are the best. They allow us to focus on the application layer and offer you a better service.