The need for a backup hosting service
Over the last week or so I’ve been going through reviews of a number of different hosting services to see what would be the best one to go for with our American targeted sites.
Even though there are a handful of hosts that seem pretty much perfect in all the review sites (of which Web Hosting Jury seems the most useful), for every PerfectHost.com, there’s a corresponding PerfectHost-Sucks.com and oodles of blogs running them down. Now obviously, any hosting service is going to make mistakes and the better ones tend to talk quite openly about the mistakes they’ve made but just because they’re not talking about them doesn’t mean that they’re not happening.
What’s also clear is that good hosts can go bad very quickly indeed. Powweb for instance seems to have been consistently excellent until they were taken over by Endurance in 2006. This isn’t reflected as quickly as you might expect in the various review sites as they tend to take into account all reviews so a company sitting with 90% ratings will take some time to drop to 70%.
Even with sites rated as excellent, they are quite consistent in taking a very dim view of you writing very negative comments about their service on your blog whilst it’s hosted with them and seem to suspend hosting accounts very quickly in those circumstances. Whilst taking down a blog would usually fall into the category of unfortunate but livable with, it’s clearly going to be a different matter if you’re hosting sites which provide you with a living on the same service.
Which is a long way of telling you that it’s prudent to have more than one hosting service to play with.
Too expensive? Certainly if you were running simultaneously with two fullscale hosting accounts it might be but since you can get US hosting for as little as $12 per year and UK hosting for around £25 per year it’s pretty cheap to have another hosting service waiting in the wings for when you really need it. You wouldn’t be limited to the cheap service plan were you ever to need to start using it as your primary hosting service as it’s very quick and easy to upgrade these plans.
One other key thing to avoid is registering your domains with your hosting service. Many of those people who did have issues with their host found that they then couldn’t move their domain to another hosting service. Many people end up in this situation as they’ve taken up the offer of a free domain with their hosting service but you have to question whether saving $10 a year is worth it when you consider the problems that can arise from it should you ever fall out with your hosting service.
What do I do about all this? Well, I use godaddy as my registrar, this site is hosted with EUKHost in the UK and I have 1and1 as my UK backup host which is probably overkill but the extra £25 per year that this costs seems pretty cheap insurance to me.
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Copyright © 2008-2010 by Arnold Stewart. All rights reserved.