Mission critical websites and web hosting. After many and many long hours and meeting the acronym named committee at your place of employment may well have chosen you to do the workup and work through to come up with a good recommended web hosting provider. Always it’s an issue of cost versus benefit – all in line with saving costs, value and keeping budgets in line. This is even truer in 2009 / 2010 with an economic business recession in full bloom. What criteria should you follow in your award or awards?

First of all determine your needs. Among the basic criteria are reliability and speed. Have a host that goes down all the time when you are running an ecommerce site is just plain poor value. You only get one chance for a customer. Even if you are lucky enough to have a bargain unreliable host up and working it sure does not create an impression of care and attention to detail that fosters and nurtures an image of a reliable business that someone half way around the world will submit payment to.

It can be said that part of the analysis and analytical problem and concern in the exercise is a lack of vendor stability. The web hosting marketplace is more than extremely competitive. It’s easy to appear large in this community. Yet many sales groups are simply web space resellers, purchasing space in a “reseller” web host account from a host, whom they chose based on cost or a deal offered to them. Yet when it comes to concerns and problems you are many steps away from the real authorities. On top of that the reseller that you are coordinating with may be simply a marketer or business person lacking real computer, IT and computerized system networking skills.

To some degree where your website is physically and geographically located is of minor concern. Many never know or even care. It is simply a matter of “Does the website load fast?” Yet one consideration by Google of where they place their “data centers” is to be nearby major centers of population or in your case your customer base. There will be a lag in time , guaranteed as your data traverses the world wide web whether it be close nearby in the US or UK, in Winnipeg Canada or to far off Bangalore India . True computerized network switches on the internet “highway” gets faster and faster each and every year and speed over great distances is not such an issue anymore. Yet one thing that you can count on , is the longer the distance traveled for your website loading on a customer’s browser , that you can bet your bottom dollar , that data transmission lag , is always part of the overall mix , and customer satisfaction levels.

In today’s marketplace and business environment the old standby’s of advertising and promotion – be it the newspaper media outlets, or TV and radio are being reduced in stature and effect each and every day. John Heppenstal of Hep Communications, a Winnipeg based media marketing specialists’ states clearly that “the four p’s of marketing are dead”. If your customer cannot reach you or your product with several clicks of their computer mouse, then you dead in the water. The web hosts and web hosting decisions that you make today – lay the very foundation and reputation of your future marketing efforts, plans and ultimate profitability.

Search Engine Optimization Engineer and Winnipeg Web Designers