The term deals is often synonymous with website hosting. Hosting in many people eyes is all about finding the lowest price, combined with good support. We want it all. Best price. Best Support. In the old print trade the sales mantra was “Best price, quality, turnaround – Pick two”, meaning the client couldn’t get it all and was forced to make a choice. This applies to most things we buy.
Certainly if we look at general value for money, then there’s a some good US host companies that are hard to beat. But even there, due to the distance from their host server, NZ visitors to their site will never get the same performance and response times as a fast NZ host server, which will always be more costly. So, you may get best price and best support, but not best performance from the US providers. Many think the large cloud options like Amazon or Rackspace would shine, but they do not and often represent the worst value for NZ businesses.
So, what choices are there in NZ? Sadly the shortlist is small and like host companies offshore, the good ones may not last long or may appear too costly. Many start out well, but 12 months later as the server gets busier, performance dwindles. The buyup of many NZ host companies by the Auzzies doesn’t help much either as the drive for profits is more important than speed or support.
So, what should good hosting cost?
For business users I’d say a $100 per month for managed, high speed, highly secure VPS hosting package. A busy e-commerce website could be more dependent upon the traffic it gets.
Yet the expectation by most business owners and marketers is often closer to $10-30/mth. Happy to spend thousands on the website design and the look of the site, yet insist upon bargain basement hosting that keeps the site live. It’s like buying a nice car, but unwilling to cover the cost of petrol, insurance, maintenance or upkeep.
The other side of the coin is the frustration host companies face are they’re often not deemed important compared with investment in Adwords, or website design. Many are being driven to the wall up-keeping their systems to keep them secure against the nasty bots attacking them day and night. Today over 60% of the traffic online is bots or spam with malicious intent. Yet hosts aren’t able to increase their prices. Running a host company was once a profitable business, but less so today.
Hosting is not a commodity product and all hosts are not the same. What may be ideal for one person or company could be a disaster for another. Unlike buying other goods or services, asking a ‘mate’ or guy in the IT sector is not the answer. For business websites, it takes careful analysis and research to come up with the right answer or host company. Even then, be prepared to change if you have to later.