Host with the Most: What to Look for in Hosting Providers

Defining hosting options is something that’s important to do as early on in the production process as possible, should they be relevant for your project. When searching for a provider to host your content, look for someone who offers a variety of easy-to-use services and is eager to become your ally when developing Web projects. Sure, cost-effectiveness is important, but available tech support and a wide array of easy-to-configure utilities and server enhancements go a long way in making your job as a developer much easier.

A difficult or unresponsive hosting provider can be one of the quickest ways to ruin a relationship between you and your client. If something goes wrong on the server and you don’t have the access privileges to fix it or can’t get hold of the person who does, you will find yourself in an awkward predicament. Should the problem take the form of an unresponsive or broken website, you can be certain that as their developer you are the first person a client will turn to when something goes wrong.

Hosting provider Jason Saunders from Charlottezweb.com agrees. “As a designer or developer, your clients turn to you for guidance not only on their site’s creation and maintenance, but also if they have any problems as well. If they are tech-savvy and handle their domain/hosting independently, you may not need to worry about server-side problems. I have personally found, however, that most of my clients are fairly reliant upon my advice. With that in mind, the need to deliver what you promise to them is key. Hosting is something taken for granted when everything goes well but can very quickly turn a project sour when there are problems.”

If you don’t want to be a systems administrator yourself, you owe it to your clients to partner with someone who is willing to handle those responsibilities and will be readily available to help should something go wrong. Jason’s past experience as a developer has made him sympathetic to the plight of working with inadequate hosting providers and he tapped into that experience when setting his company up and creating services for his clients.

“I started out on the design-side and ultimately got my first dedicated server as a direct result of not being happy with the hosting accounts I had for my clients with various other providers,” Jason says.

He employs a variety of server-side utilities to help his clients easily administer their sites and make the jobs of those who are developers easier. “Charlottezweb utilizes cPanel with some custom additions so clients can set up and manage many account features on their own through an administrative interface that facilitates control over backups, email accounts, databases, statistics, subdomains, shopping carts, and so on,” Jason says. “Couple that with a willingness to install custom configurations that are safe for a shared environment and I think we offer a pretty well-rounded set of services geared toward developers and the general public alike.”

Jason finds working with designers and developers makes his job easier as well. “Without a doubt, when I have current developers who purchase accounts for their clients, it makes my job easier because these users are typically a tech-savvy group, which means far fewer support tickets to respond to than would be the case for someone completely new to hosting.  That’s a definite reason for me to continue to provide the best level of support I can for my multi-account holders to keep them happy with my service.”

Need to develop tech specs for a project?  Be sure to include some kind of statement that breaks down the services and support a project’s hosting provider offers. If at all possible, try to find a hosting provider that both you and your clients can grow with over time. If a client is gung-ho about using their existing provider, be sure to thoroughly research the provider’s hosting and support options before committing to their project. Finding out that a hosting provider doesn’t support a key piece of technology required to make your site work halfway through development can be an ugly surprise.

This text was originally published in Tim Frick’s book “Managing Interactive Media Projects” available here.