Reliable web hosting and budget web hosting
I had an interesting experience recently when developing a new site for a client. The client had an existing web site hosted with a budget web host.
The new site uses the Joomla content management system, and so required a MySQL database to be set up on the web hosting account. Whilst developing the new site, I also set up a test area on the same web server, in a password-protected sub-folder.
During the course of setting up this site, a few issues came to light about the features of using this budget web host:
- adding a MySQL database cost an extra £25 p.a. for each database
- setting up password protection on the folder cost £10 p.a.
During the project, it became apparent that the site would occasionally freeze, so I decided to set up a ping test to notify me whenever the site was inaccessible. Over the course of about 6 weeks, the site went down 6 times! Sometimes, the site was down for just a few minutes, but one day it appeared to be down for about an hour and a half.
I have to say that there could be genuine reasons for the downtime. And no web hosting service can be up 100% of the time – technical issues will occasionally arise. And cheap web hosting means shared web hosting, which can be more vulnerable to technical issues, because of the number of different web sites that may be sharing the same server. But, for me, this raised a couple of issues:
- cheap web hosting may not be cheap, when you add in the extra charges for fairly basic requirements
- web hosting reliability is extremely important, and it is difficult to forget a bad experience
The client eventually decided to move the hosting to an Interact web hosting account.
Interact web hosting
Interact is a reseller of web hosting to clients. For comparison, at the moment (February 2011) a standard hosting account:
- includes up to 4 MySQL databases
- has no extra charges for simple features like password protecting folders
- costs just £99 + VAT p.a.
For more information, see the web hosting page.