Comments on: Best Practices in Web Development: Part 2

By: Carmen

Carmen — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 11:58:11 +0000

I have been reading your articles and find them very informative, even after 14 years of developing websites myself and running a full service hosting company. Many of the clients do not realize what a good level of support is and how good reliability translates into their websites being successful.

Being developers ourselves gives us the ability to understand and aid in trouble shooting with other developers, which is the bulk of our customer base. But it is a challenge to compete with less forward thinking hosting companies which offer 3.95 hosting and no phone contact at all.

In regards to uptime, although it can be addressed by reliable hardware, it is much more important to look at the carriers used and redundancy. It should almost be a given that a responsible hosting company would have the users setup properly and be paying attention to security in these times. Keep up the good work with the articles, I think our entire industry can benefit from articles like these.

Carmen Santora

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:14:40 +0000

I agree with chi!

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:30:04 +0000

Thanks, Chi! Uptime is something I didn’t really touch on — although it’s probably fairly closely related to having generally robust servers!

I’ve been in situations where I coudl see other’s accounts as well — that’s just wrong!

By: chi

chi — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:17:29 +0000

Good solid post on hosting. I have to admit, the only things I’ve worried about was mostly bandwidth and uptime and I’ve been creating sites for over 10 years. After finding my current host, you touch on a lot of topics I’ve learned about a good host. Updated mysql and patches for PHP programs, quick response to hacks, attentive support, etc… One time I was able to see other people’s accounts - scary.

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:05:19 +0000

It’s a major issue — one of those points where you can’t fix the problem without changing servers, no matter how hard you work. Scripts will be slow, downloads will be slow, page loads will be slow…even with lean and refined file sizes. Good thing to avoid!

Dedicated hosting is definitely a good way to provide more control over issues.

By: Derrick

Derrick — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:39:49 +0000

Are their servers snappy?
{Realistically speaking, most sites are very small — hosting companies can easily get away with this. However, no hosting company can get away with slow servers. If you can check the server statistics, that’ll help you know what you’re getting into.}

This was one of my biggest concerns when I would recommend clients who i’ve recently developed a website. While we we optimize pages for load efficiency a slow loading server is a slow loading server there nothing to do about that besides change hosting providers. To circumvent this issue I now have my own dedicated hosting for my clients : ).. All in all make sure you check up on the server stats. DH