Where is your site hosted?

All websites need to be hosted on a server, which can physically be anywhere in the world, and with prices ranging from £4.99 a month to £499 a month, how do you know what is right for you?

Let me run you through the possible pitfalls and obstacles which can help you choose the right supplier.

• Physical location of server and hosting, Generally the lower end of the market is for servers in far flung locations, which can be slower, less reliable and harder to maintain. While it is true that you can access your hosting from anywhere, it is generally easier if the people in the hosting centre are awake when you are! i3media has a choice of suppliers, but all are UK based and have 24/7 maintenance

• Managed or not?  Fully managed servers are, as you would expect, more expensive. However if it fails at 3am do you want to find out by an email in the morning telling you it failed and was restarted in 10 mins, or by logging in - seeing your site is dead and then contacting your supplier? We can supply fully managed servers on the same systems as used by Tesco's and the UK Army! Just about as reliable as you can get

• Shared servers or dedicated hosting,  This depends on how busy you are. Dedicated server is cheaper but means you are getting a percentage of a server. The problem is if you start getting a lot of traffic - or if someone else on your server starts getting busy then your hosting start slowing down. At i3media we make sure the total traffic for all the sites on any shared server is well below the limits of the machine and that should you start getting large amounts of traffic, we can quickly move you to more suitable and dedicated hardware.

• Security, There are three types of server and hosting security you need to worry about. The first is the quality of the actual website, can it be hacked and accessed without your knowledge. Then there is Server level - firewalls, passwords, encryption etc. Finally physical security. Is the server centre secure, does it have password access, fire suppression, its own power, are there people there 24/7? If required we can ensure the utmost levels of security that are needed for any level of website

• Server Bandwidth,  The reality is most websites never use a large amount of bandwidth. Even getting to 3 or 4 Gb a month is unusual for most sites. Having said that when a site does get mass appeal it doesn't just increase a little it explodes. We have sites that went from 5gb a month to 1400GB a month in 4 weeks.

This brings its own set of problems, not the least excess bandwidth charges which can be as high as £10 per GB over your limit on some servers. We have even had clients who thought they had unlimited bandwidth but when they hit 25Gb they found out that thier site was shut down! i3media will ensure you are always aware of any extra charges and are on a suitable server for the size of your business.

• Back ups, Any host worth its salt needs to be backing up your site regularly and with tested copies. The time to find out if the back ups are faulty is not when you accidentally delete 500 products. Trust me this happens, and we know companies that nearly ceased trading due to faulty back ups.

As you can see it's not such an easy decision, but something that we can guide you through, so give us a call or drop us an email and we will try and help.