How-to Guides - IT & Internet

Website ownership considerations

In today’s digital environment it is essential for any organisation to have an online presence. Normally an online presence will begin with a website. Websites do not have to be expensive or time cosuming if your organsation is equipped with the right information.

Questions to ask your web host provider
Understanding web hosting uptime
Free web hosting
Recommendations for free web hosting
Keeping content relevant
Domain names

Considerations and questions to ask your web host provider

Web hosting costs can vary form $3 per month to $2000 per month. In the middle of the range hosting costs are between $15 and $35 per month. Many organisations see the price and make their decision based solely on price alone without consideration for the services that are offered.

In New Zealand there are 5 major differences in web hosting.

1. Option 1 Sites hosted on physical computers in New Zealand that have New Zealand staff physically monitoring the computers in a data centre.
2. Option 2 Sites that are hosted on computers overseas. Often in countries such as India, America, Thailand and Philippines. Basically any country that has cheap technical skills will offer the world cheap hosting. Server maintenance and backups usually occur in the evening in these countries. This results in slow speeds to your site and unavailability issues with no notice are common.
3. Option 3 Resellers who resell a rebranded service from either the New Zealand hosting company or create a third level of ownership and resell the reseller account from an international company.
4. Option 4 Companies that host a dedicated computer that is solely yours. This is usually by Application Service Providers who provide cloud computing services. If your organisaiton has an important application that is accessed via the web then you will probably use this service.
5. Option 5 Amateur and novice web hosts who have built a web server and host sites from their own home.

Option 1
This is the most expensive option but the most reliable option in terms of accessibility, reliability and customer service as you deal directly with the technicians and owners of the servers. They are also governed by New Zealand legislation.

Their organisation reputation is immediately known and effected by their level of customer service and technical knowledge. These organisations are normally nationwide and have 0800 numbers that you can access a help desk with New Zealand staff who can elevate your question to a more senior technical person should it be required. It is also common for these organsations to also resell domain names and have the authorised .nz reseller logo which guarantees a high level of financial commitment and infrastructure. In summary these companies are unlikely to cease to exist overnight and take your web site with them.

Option 2
This is the cheapest web hosting option available and also the most unreliable with questionable technical support. Such servers are often restarted with no warning resulting in your web site and email be un accessible for minutes and sometimes hours at a time.

It is common for web designers and anyone with an interest in the Internet to set up a web hosting business for a small amount of money. It is also common for such business to appear overnight and disappear with your web site and information just as quickly. Another common practice with such hosting companies is that clients are on sold to other companies whom often resell the clients again and again. This results in the web sites being unavailable and the clients continually being required to update details to ensure their site is functioning. Privacy and Security issues are a large concern as many external parties are privy to your information.

Option 3
Exactly the same risks as with option 2 but the risk is higher and the service is often as expensive as option 1 but without all of the guarantees of quality customer service and guarantee accessibility to your online presence.

Option 4
Unless you are a commercial organisation there is no need to have your own dedicated server even if you have an ecommerce site.

Option 5
This option should only be used for personal sites and to test web sites. Although this may be a free option it is certainly a large risk and a security issue to your viewers as they could get viruses from the home computer or the site could easily be hacked into as the home computer is not advanced enough for hosting.

Understanding web hosting uptime

It is a popular myth that you should base your hosting decision on the uptime of the web host provider. But, little is known by the non technical community what uptime really means.

There is no such thing as 100% uptime. If a company is advertising 100% uptime then you should be cautious. It is technically impossible to achieve 100% uptime.

When hosting companies calculate the hosting uptime of their web servers they do not account for maintenance which could render the web server down for 2 hours each month. For example if a host advertises their hosting up time is 99.9% this is minus the maintenance time.

99% of uptime is equal to 1.45 hours per month of downtime. Therefore 99.8% is twice the amount of downtime eg, 2.9 hours of downtime per down time.

Many hosts who use overseas servers will claim to have unlimited bandwidth or unlimited space. This is true for most customers but others can be suspended or asked to pay more to resume their services. If your organisation is popular and has a lot of visitors, then you could be suspended from your host.

Here are three common clauses found in the small print of your hosting agreement*. If your host or potential host does not have an agreement this should be of concern.

• Not counting maintenance downtime – If a hosting company interrupts the service for two hours to perform planned maintenance, this will often not be counted into the uptime percentage. In other words, when it’s time to calculate the uptime percentage for that month, any planned service interruptions simply aren’t counted.
• Not counting shorter periods of downtime – Perhaps the most prominent example of this is Google Apps (including Gmail) which won’t count any downtime that is shorter than 10 minutes. So if Gmail were to be down five different nine-minute periods, you’d have had 45 minutes of actual downtime, but no official downtime as far as Google is concerned. Only counting network downtime – This one is especially common among dedicated hosting providers. Individual server failures that may or may not affect your site aren’t counted. To be fair, for dedicated hosting providers it would be difficult to guarantee anything else when the customer has control over the server.

* Copied from Royal Pingdom, an International web monitoring company.

Questions to ask your web host provider

1. Where are your web servers located and who owns the servers?
2. How many people work at your company and how many people are responsible for customer service?
3. What customer support is available, ie Phone, email or web based. Some companies only offer web based support with a 48 hour turn-around period to reply.
4. What is the response time of your customer support?
5. What hours does your customer support team work?
6. How often are the sites backed up and how quickly can you access a backup?
7. Are there any charges in obtaining a backup?
8. Apart from the monthly or annual hosting fees, what other services will you be charged for ?. This is extremely important as most web services should be made available as part of your hosting plan.

Free web hosting

Free web hosting is often an essential part of many community online web sites. However, it's possible - as was recently seen with the close of the well-established Yahoo Geocities free web hosting - that community organisaitons can be left without an online presence with little or no notice, regardless of the size of the company and how many years the service has been offered.

Community groups should plan for sudden closures of free hosting by always being familiar with alternative hosting options and always have a backup of their web site stored offline. It is also advisable to use your own domain name to reduce your marketing costs and cause less confusion with your end users being forced to remember several different hard to recall web addresses when you change between your free web host providers.

To use your own domain name you will need to add the free web site address details in the control box of your domain name. This task does not require any technical skills.

Recommendations for free web hosting

WordPress.com offer free templates and hosting using a WordPress Content Management System. Though specifically for Bloggers the templates are easily customisable to create web sites that vary in appearance and functionality.

Google Sites is ideal for many web sites. A Google account is required to access the service. Included with Google Host is a Content Management System to allow for easy creation and editing of a new site.

Sponsorship from local web companies. Many local web companies offer sponsorship for web hosting to community based and not for profit groups.

Keeping Content Relevant

Keep your website up-to-date and in order. You don't need any special skills for a review, just the ability to use a web browser and make some notes. Here's a checklist.

Contact details:

• are they on your website?
• are they easy to find?
• are they accurate?
• Do email links and contact forms still work?

If you have a News section:

• are the items listed still news or are they now "olds"?
• have things happened recently that have not been listed?
• should you move older items to a News archive?

If you have a section about your activities:

• are the activities still current?
• are contact details correct?
• are the dates correct?

If you have a section for newsletters, meeting minutes etc:

• has the most recent material been added?
• should older material be put into archives by year?
• do the links contain information about size and format?
• is there a link to download Adobe Reader (if there are items in PDF format)?

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