Website hosting – doing it right
Why cheap hosting for your practice website is false economy
Whilst the large majority of dentists completely understand the importance of hosting a dental website using professional, business-grade services; periodically we do get web design clients who ask us to use hosting they have registered themselves or as recommended by their local IT support company. Whilst we will do this, experience suggests that problems can arise at some point, either with the initial website deployment or downstream when something goes wrong.
More often than not, this scenario arises when the client has been attracted by a hosting service which is low cost. It’s easy to see why this can happen as anyone who subscribes to or has read a PC magazine or visited a “tech” website online, will have seen advertisements for annual hosting from as little as £20 per year. But cheap is not always good, indeed it’s very often pretty bad and this is usually the case with “budget” web hosting.
What is “budget” website hosting?
This type of service is primarily suitable for DIY projects which are not business critical i.e. where outages and lack of support will not materially affect you. So hobbyists etc may find budget hosting very accessible as long as their primary concern isn’t quality and stability.
Why businesses should avoid budget hosting
If your website is important for your business (and whose isn’t?) then you should avoid using budget hosting services for the following reasons:
- slow, over-crowded servers – your site will be packed in alongside hundreds if not thousands of others which often leads to slow page loading and worse, outages. The only way the budget hosters can make money is to utilise their resources to the max – which often means that you lose out.
- lack of support – if something goes wrong, expect to be waiting days not minutes for a response to your support request. Sometimes it may not come at all. With due respect, if you decide to go the budget route, don’t expect your designer to jump right in to bail you out instantly when things go wrong.
- lack of proactive monitoring – here at Dental Media we monitor all of our client’s websites proactively. So if something goes wrong technically we are on to it well before you even realise. Understandably, we don’t monitor 3rd party services, so if they fail, then it’s down to you to notice it and then have it fixed.
- hacking – is your budget hosting company up-to-speed with the latest security patches and software releases? You may think so but it’s often not the case. Only last week we were asked by a self-hosted client to install a blog on his web space. When we accessed, we found out that not only had some of his emails stopped working, but also that his hosts were still running software which was two years out-of-date and very insecure.
- “bad neighbourhoods” – this is a phrase used to describe servers which host “dodgy” websites which Google may not approve of. So for example, sites used for spamming, attempts to manipulate search results and so forth. Budget hosts are much less diligent when it comes to identifying and eliminating this type of activity meaning that your website could be sat on a server which has been black-listed by Google. If this happens, your search ranking results can tank.
- lack of back-ups – what happens when something goes wrong with your website, for example you make some big errors in the content management system and the whole site needs to be restored from a recent back-up? Professional hosts back up every night, indeed here at Dental Media we have incremental back-ups running every 30 minutes on some of our systems. Budget hosts are notoriously bad at taking back-ups and hence take no responsibility if your site goes down. What should be a 5 minute recovery process could take much longer and involve paying your designer for help.
What does professional website hosting cost?
Given the huge difference in performance and reliability between budget and professional hosting, you might think that it costs a lot of money to do it right? This is not necessarily the case. For example, we manage hundreds of dental websites and use a very robust, fast and professionally supported hosting infrastructure. Due to economies of scale, we are able to offer these services to clients extremely cost-effectively. Please ask for details.
Summary
Your dental practice website is an essential part of your business which needs to run 24/7/365 without you having to worry about it. If you go the cheap hosting route, you may save a few pounds initially but you will lose way more on the very first outage. It simply isn’t worth the risk.
To find out more about our professional website hosting and email services for dentists, please call the Dental Media team on 01332 672548. In most cases, we can transfer your website to our services free of charge.