Get a reliable web host

[webtycoon]

Getting a reliable web host is extremely
important to running your business for a
multitude of reasons.

One of the most important reasons is because
you need to have good service from the people
supporting your business. They can perform a
number of different and interesting tasks for
you. For example, if you need a small program
that does something special for your business
you can hire your web hosting company to
create that program and get them to install it on
your system for a very reasonable fee.

Your web host should provide you with good
security. They should have all the big security
issues worked out so that people can't hack into
your website and do nasty things to your
information. You cannot imagine how easy it is
for someone to hack into systems and destroy
your stuff or get confidential information… you
want a host that knows how to protect their
system… someone who is completely on top of
all the things that hackers can do.

Getting reliable connection time to all your
customers is extremely important. If you have
a web host that has poor connectivity to the
Internet you have a problem in getting reliable
connection times. Your customers maybe have
to wait 30 seconds for a page to load one time
and then only a few seconds for that same page
to load another time. And of course the biggest
problem is that people don't wait for long
download times. Your web host has to download
fast.

A really important factor is to make sure your
web host has a connection to the East Coast
backbone and the West Coast backbone. Most
web hosts don't have this. What often happens
is a fiber optics cable gets cut on the West Coast
which means that all web sites and web hosts on
the West Coast of the continent go down. The
East Coast is fully operational. So people from
the East Coast can't reach your West Coast
website, they can only reach East Coast
websites. And vice versa. So in order to make
sure you have continuity of service, what you
need is a backbone to both the East Coast and
the West Coast through your web host.
They should have a minimum of a T1 going to
both East Coast and West Coast backbones. And
you have to make sure they are truly going to
each of the backbones because it can get very
confusing as to who is connected to what.
We've been involved with a couple of hosts in the
past who have said they had a separate
connection to both the East and West Coasts.
What they didn't know was that their East Coast
host was actually their upstream West Coast
Host. So when the West Coast went down, their
entire network went down… because their East
Coast connection was routed though a West
Coast provider. I know it's a bit confusing but
bear with me… the bottom line is that it's
important for your website host to have separate
connections to the main backbones in both the
East Coast and the West Coast.

Having this capability means that if for some
reason your West Coast connection goes down,
all the people on the East Cost can still access
you because you are also connected to the East
Coast backbone.
It is really important to have this capability.
Don't get fooled by all the FREE web hosting
there is out there. There are a couple of
problems with free web hosting:

To be continue...

Artical from:
Derek Ghel
CEO IMC