I’ve covered the importance of web hosting in my previous posts, and today I’d like to offer you a legitimate case study.

It’s actually one of my web properties.

Although not considerable in value, this property – it’s a blog on mobile phone – is nevertheless very important to me.

In fact, all of my web properties are very important to me, so that I can’t tolerate any complacents related to them. I’m sure you agree with me on this.

The case study

Let’s say the blog is hosted on X web hosting company. When I opened an account with them, all looks fantastic – nice site management tools, domain name management tools, and other tools that are (supposedly) add value. What’s more, they are on promo – so it’s fairly a cheap hosting at that time.

However, the X company seems to forget their number one critical success factor in offering web hosting solutions for clients – reliability.

To cut long story short, my blog seems slow and patchy at times, and it’s rarely cannot be displayed due to server problems. This results in dropped traffic, SERPs, and eventually PageRank, not mentioning readership and Google AdSense revenue!

Regarding the latter – I’m not sure whether it’s related to web hosting reliability or not, but logically, if Google ‘see’ your site going up and down too often, I think it will see my blog less important, hence dropped in PageRank. Any explanation would be much appreciated :)

This is recoverable, but it wouldn’t be easy.

Anyway, I can’t ask the refund (it’s already passed the money back guarantee period) and I’ve paid for a year in advance!

This post is not about me nagging, ranting and whining on one of my web hosting provider. This post is about looking for the right web hosting solution for you first, and blog setup second.

How NOT to regret choosing the web hosting solution for your valuable web property

I’ve actually wrote about this before, but to sum it up, there are two things you should consider doing before deciding on a web hosting partner for your website:

1. web hosting reviews
   This is the first thing every web property investor should do – read what others say about web hosting provider companies, and highly consider opening an account with the best rated.
2. web hosting articles
   Read web hosting articles to learn the ins and outs of choosing the right web hosting, and what kind of support and tools you should expect a good web hosting provider offer you.

One word of advice: Don’t choose a web hosting company because it is offering a promotional discount or it is the cheapest of all. Good web hosting companies charge top dollars for some reasons, and it’s better to do window shopping for a while before deciding on one.

And, oh, if you did choose one, I recommend you to stick to it for your other web properties. Stop doing trial and error to save you money and your web properties!

Ivan Widjaya
Host your web property right
Image by Tim Dorr.