In order for a website to be visible to the Internet, it needs to be hosted somewhere. Thus, a web host is a company that provides the service of hosting websites.
As a long time web developer, I have had the benefit of working with several different hosting companies and platforms over the years. As a result, I have developed certain preferences from my experience.
However, I’d like to point out why your choice of web hosting for your law firm website is important.
If anything goes wrong with your hosting, your law firm web presence will be temporarily gone. This means that your personal and professional reputation may be effected in some way. Moreover, email receipt and delivery may be effected depending on your particular setup.
If your law firm website is down, some opportunities may be lost as a result. While some technical problems are to be expected, it is important to choose a quality service with accessible and reliable customer support for a number of reasons.
For many, the main factor in choosing a host is price. However, it is important to note that price and value are two different things entirely.
Here are some qualities to look for in a host:
Performance
Many SEO experts believe that the loading speed of a website is one of the factors that can influence search engine rankings. For example, a number of Google experts have implied that this is already the case. Given that Google Webmaster Central has included speed optimization and performance tracking, I also believe speed is already a factor for Google.
Google is not the only reason to be concerned about speed though. One should also be concerned because some people simply won’t wait to view a slow loading website. If your site is too slow, you may lose opportunities to your competitors. Know this, even the BIG hosting companies can sell slow hosting (I won’t name any names here, but my clients are free to inquire of my research results).
Stability
This is the area that I am most concerned about. When your site goes down, people can’t access it. As a result, sales may be lost, and reputations may be negatively effected. However, hosting is not the only reason a site may appear to be down. In fact, ISPs’ can be responsible. You see, not everyone knows this, but some ISPs are not so good at handling DNS requests making a site look like it is down, when it isn’t.
A while back, I used to have this problem myself, until I switched to Google Public DNS. Google Public DNS is a free service that Google offers which lets you use Google’s DNS over your ISPs. In order to use it, however, you will have to change some settings in your operating system. If you are currently having difficulty accessing any websites, you should consider switching as a potential remedy to the problem.
Support
If something goes wrong with your law firm web site, You will want quick support and smaller companies are sometimes better at this. In my mind, quick support is worth paying a few more dollars a month for.
Expect there to be problems here and there. There will always be occasional technical issues that need to be resolved. However, if your hosting company does not give you good support, you will have a hard time figuring out the cause of any problems you might be experiencing.
If your site is down, don’t immediately blame your web designer, because its probably not their fault. If you ask your web designer to resolve a hosting issue and you are actually hosting with someone else and don’t have a maintenance plan with them, you should expect an invoice. Your web designer’s time is worth money too — so don’t expect free support if you host somewhere else.
Another thing to watch out for is “Sales Support” — the type of support that tries to sell you an additional service to fix your problem. If your host uses “Sales Support” tactics, watch out, they may trick you into an unnecessary up sell. An example of this would be, “Your site is down because you are running a demanding application on it, but if you upgrade to our platinum service, you won’t have this problem.”
Control Panel
Many big hosting companies use their own proprietary control panels instead of more standardized systems. The control panel is important because it will influence how easy it is to build and maintain a website on the service.
Specs Do Matter
Another important are of consideration to is to consider how many other sites are on the server itself. The more sites on the server, the less the overall performance. This is why the number of IP Neighbors your site has is important. You don’t necessarily want lots of neighbors. Moreover, the quality of IP Neighbors can also be a issue. You would not want to be a neighbor of a spammer and have your shared server blacklisted for spam.
I hope you found this information helpful.
Best Regards,
Kirk
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