Choosing a Web Host - performance and reliability
There are a huge number of different web hosts or web hosting companies to choose from. It is best to choose the most reliable host - the one with the smallest amount of downtime. Any quoted figure of less than 99.5% SLA uptime is poor. This figure might look good but actually corresponds to 3.5 hours of downtime in any month - enough for a business or organisation to notice.
Unfortunately, quoted reliability figures are not always what they seem. They exclude very short downtimes of a few minutes (for rebooting the server) and they also exclude planned downtime for upgrades when clients have been informed (even if this takes many hours).
Customer service is also important - and we have found the smaller hosting companies to be better, probably because their support is handled by qualified technicians rather then help desk staff. Round the clock support for hosting is also important for any business website. When selecting new hosting companies we always send the first request out of standard business hours to test the level of support. Very few hosting companies actually operate the required 24/7 level of service.
Choosing web hosting - functionality
There is no need for any small organisation to put up with advertising banners across their website. For basic web hosting you should be able to get webstats, cgi/php scripts and multiple email accounts.
For anything other than a simple home user website we would recommend getting provision of 1 MySQL database. We would not recommend using the free web space provided by ISP's for any business website.
Unless your website has ASP applications which require a Windows server, we would recommend a Unix/Linux platform as these servers are more reliable, cheaper and applications tend to be better written and run faster on this platform.
Web hosting services by Cornish WebServices
Cornish WebServices can, if required, provide suitable web hosting services for clients using our website design or marketing services. We will either use our our own dedicated server (maintained by a 3rd party hosting company) or use our experience to select a good quality and value for money hosting company. This choice is partly governed by the size and no. of visitors to the website, although the web host we usually use can cater well with very large and high volume websites.
All hosting includes good web statistics, full scripting and database facilities and multiple email accounts. Our business is Internet Marketing and website design. We do not make money from client hosting, but provide this as a service (it is often quicker for us to use our dedicated server than sort out problems on client hosts).
We are also happy to work with any existing host a client has, provided this can provide the required level of service. Although we prefer to work with unix servers, especially for database driven websites, we do not insist on this and are able to work with other types, such as Windows servers.
Why do you not maintain your own servers?
This is (in our opinion) a 24/7 operation, with staff on call to respond to server problems. We are not setup to provide this service, so prefer to make use of 3rd party hosting companies who are.
