GEEKNOTE: Years ago, I had a flight instructor who had an expression to describe some people: "You buy them books and they eat the covers."
From time to time, I run across these people.
Web hosting involves more than simply signing up for the cheapest web hosting plan you can find and putting your website up for all to see. Cheap web hosting is not a bargain and it may well be more expensive in the long run than hosting with a quality company. It is one thing to put up a personal blog using a cheap web host. It is another thing entirely to put a business or even a non-profit organization site up on this sort of site.
Years ago, we helped a local non-profit in a bind and up until last month, we provided free hosting for them. We actually host a number of such sites for free and, depending on the group, I've been known to donate the design work for them as well. This summer, this particular group had a volunteer offer to take over updating their website. Fair enough, I have enough volunteer projects to keep my free time occupied.
The non-profit's executive director let me know that the volunteer would be doing the updates and we gave him full access to the site. Things went okay for a while. The first clue that this was not going to end well was when the volunteer sent me an email asking me to change the name servers so he could finish up the completely new site he had designed and, by the way, the executive director was all in agreement with this change. I changed the name servers for them and the site promptly broke. I figured they had some minor configuration issue that would take a few minutes to fix. Nope.
After a few days, the volunteer put a "coming soon" page that stayed up for a couple of weeks and the new site finally went live the first of this month. I'm going to guess that the new website wasn't quite as "almost finished" as the executive director and I had been lead to believe.
The new site looks quite nice and everything went fine until this weekend when the non-profit threw a fund raiser and the site exceeded the tiny monthly bandwidth allowance included with the cheap hosting plan they signed up for and everyone trying to visit the site got a "Bandwidth Exceeded" message.
There are several lessons to be learned from this tale.
First off, it is important pick a hosting plan that provides adequate resources for your website. Resources include disk space, real time bandwidth, and any monthly bandwidth limit (More correctly called a "monthly maximum data transfer" and measured in GB). We have no monthly bandwidth limit on our primary mail and web servers. They are limited only by the size of our pipe to the Internet and, if we ever get even close to saturating that, we'll just add another pipe.
We contract out for hosting for some of our fancier sites as it lets us utilize features not available on the servers we own. Last month, we only used about 3% of the monthly bandwidth allowed and that percentage doesn't change much.
The second lesson is that you need to monitor how much traffic your website is generating and make changes in your hosting agreement if you even get close to bumping up against the limits. We use Google Analytics on various sites to get a handle on how much traffic the site is getting and we watch the realtime reports generated for our contracted servers. We'll upgrade well before the monthly bandwidth limit EVER becomes an issue for us or the sites we manage.
The third lesson is that you should be willing to pay for decent web hosting and not base your decision solely on who is the cheapest. This is critical if you are a business, but only slightly less critical for non-profit groups. Even if the non-profit wrangles "free" hosting from some kind soul, they still need to make sure that the hosting won't come with limits that are going to bite them at the worst possible time.
The final lesson is that it helps to have someone with experience help you with your website and choosing where to host it. I've been at this for nearly 20 years now and I've learned from making my share of mistakes. Feel free to give me a shout. If your project is more involved than what I generally tackle, I'll be happy to give you the names and numbers of some very reputable web folks who will treat you right.
Rob Marlowe, Senior Geek
Gulfcoast Networking, Inc.
http://www.gulfcoastnetworking.com
