Guide to e-commerce - Hosting

Many providers of website hosting quote independent third-party statistics to market their hosting services. Assessing the claims based on this data is simple, but not quite as simple as it looks at first sight! Learn how to read the numbers, however, and they can provide a valuable adjunct to your decision making process.

Below, we have listed some easy-to-follow rules which will help guide you through the process.

Always look at a series of monthly data.

Advertisements will understandably tend to highlight individual months which show that particular company in a good light that month, by that measure. But clearly what you need, as a customer, is consistency of performance. Look at a history of performance, across all measures.

Be aware that new firms often perform very well at first.

That's because they have few customers, host few sites, and are therefore not stretching their newly installed servers and bandwidth. The same is true for the period immediately following major upgrades.

Don't be taken in by overkill.

The vast majority of visitors to your site will be surfing over a modem connection, and there is quite simply no extra benefit in trying to deliver data to these people more quickly than their modems can take it. In practice, we believe that provided your hosting provider consistently scores an Average Transfer Rate within the UK (measured in kilobytes/second) of over 100, they will be meeting your needs several times over.

Look at the US figures too.

Depending on the intended audience of your site, the performance figures to the US may be more or less important than the UK figures. Some of the strong UK performing hosts are weak performers to the US and vice versa. You'll notice that the overall performance figures to the US are weaker than to the UK (typically around 75% slower) so if your audience is predominantly US-based, you might choose to host or mirror the site in the US.

Check out the 'availability' figures.

These indicate for what percentage of the time each hosting provider was 'up and running' according to the testers. The results vary greatly from month to month in terms of the relative ranking of hosting providers, so be prepared to look into the historical data too!

Find out where the site is 'really' hosted.