5 good reasons why you may need to change your web host now, before it is too late

Staff, Web-Host-Search

There is a very high possibility that changing your web host now could actually save you a lot of grief in the near future. In the past people have hardly paid attention to their web hosts and have thus been ignorant to the fact that this is a choice that makes a huge impact on performance and ultimately the success of any online venture.

1)Security at your web host matters The security settings of your web host matter. They actually matter a lot. So much so that the security of your site from hacks and all the other increasing online dangers depends on it. An intensive review of your web host may lead you to look at a few other web hosts and their infrastructure with the intention of moving your hosting elsewhere.

2)Ddos attacks on another site in your hosts network will affect you The danger of Ddos attacks is on the rise. Ddos or Distributed Denial-of-service attacks have been targeted at various well known sites in the past costing losses.

These are the attacks where massive false online traffic is generated towards your site, thus crippling it. The attack is executed when thousands of compromised zombie hosts are directed against a target. These zombie hosts are unwittingly recruited from the millions of unprotected computers online and are quickly build up waiting for the command to launch a Ddos attack. The symptoms are that a site receives impossibly high false traffic that literally shuts it down.

The protection from this menace does not come cheap. The most recent Cisco Ddos protection appliance costs about $200,000. What this means is that many web hosts will not have this protection. And what makes it worse is that the attack does not need to be targeted against you for you to be affected. An attack on any single site a particular hosts' network will affect everybody.

3)Can you afford long downtime on your site You may find that your site goes down far too frequently. This could be as a result of your host gaining many more clients than their resources can support. Your site could also be taking too long to open. There are a host of other technical problems associated with your web host that could cause these.

A situation like this would mean that valuable traffic is lost forever and would be cause enough for you to change hosts to a more efficient and reliable organization.

4)If you are using a free site, you're not in serious business If you are currently using a free site, then it is imperative that you change to a paid site as soon as possible. A free site is more expensive than most can afford. A poor image and lack of credibility will mean that few people will dare buy from you. Some search engines also do not index free-hosted sites, which would impact on your traffic since search engines are the chief method of receiving traffic.

5)You will need a blog which is a challenge to most web hosts Blogs are rapidly becoming an important part of any online presence. Blogs usually put a heavy demand on networks and servers because of their nature. For example they require capabilities for rapid content updates and heavy traffic. Webmasters will need to be especially sure that their host's network is scalable enough to handle the load.

Web-Host-Search continues to do extensive research on web hosts and web hosting. This in-depth valuable information is available for free at the comprehensive web host directory, www.web-host-search.com. Visit now for your free website template.

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1 Simple Step Towards Improved Customer Satisfaction for Web Hosts Most of your customers are not unreasonable sort of people. They understand that problems crop up and mistakes do happen. I don't know about you, but I know that I am a MUCH more reasonable customer when the company I am purchasing services or products from promptly communicates any problems that arise. The web is all about communication, so you would assume that any company that makes web hosting its primary business should really understand this and put measures into place that allows for the most reliable and uninterrupted communication with their customers. We talked about this a bit in our last article and promised to give you some tips about methods we have implemented to increase our ability to communicate with our customers during emergencies. Let's face it, there isn't a web host out there who hasn't experienced times where the server that their company web site is on has gone down. Sometimes only for a few minutes, but sometimes those minutes can turn into hours - or even days if a major piece of hardware has gone belly up on you. And in most cases, you don't dedicate an entire server to your domain - you have customers who also share that server. Customers who now are not only unable to gain access to THEIR domain, but can not reach yours either. They are effectively cut off from electronic communication with you. So what do they do? How can they find out what is going on with their web site, and more importantly, when it will be back online? Some hosts, like AlphaOne Technology, have emergency support available by telephone. In that case, (if they can remember the phone number since they can not access your website to find the number), they begin calling. And calling. And calling. Usually there are over 100-200 customers hosted on a single server. Do you or your staff really have the time to be fielding that many phone calls when you are in the middle of a crisis and need to devote your time to fixing the problem and getting the server operational? Probably not. Nor do your customers want to spend time on hold or dealing with busy signals. Every minute on hold, or every call that results in a busy signal, leaves a bad impression with that customer. They want to know WHY they are down and they want to know NOW. More...