Need a Web Hosting Provider? Try the 3 a.m. Test

Room to Grow

Of course, at a certain scale, businesses simply outgrow any just-click-here approach to hosting. And while low-/no-cost options are bound to attract attention, it's shortsighted to consider only price when making a hosting decision. At first blush, the incremental cost of moving from a $200-per-month dedicated hosting arrangement (you lease the server from the hosting company, which will provide minimal support) to a $600-per-month managed hosting arrangement (you lease the server and get extensive maintenance and support guarantees) seems expensive and perhaps not worth the additional $4,800 annually, especially given the sour economy. But the cost-benefit analysis may change when you consider the cost of downtime in terms of lost business and diminished reputation.

Beyond price lurk a collection of concerns, including the long-term stability of the hosting vendor. Be wary of notable personnel churn or frequent changes of ownership. Another concern is data center redundancy, both in terms of connections to the Internet and to the power grid. Due the ever-escalating arms race against spam, it's a good idea to ask whether the host has any blacklisted IPs-addresses from which other networks refuse e-mails. And insist that you never be distributed from any such tainted IPs, particularly if you plan any extensive e-mail campaigns.

"Bandwidth is the most important thing; my site gets about a million unique visitors a month and I get occasionally daily spikes if I write something a lot of people link to so I need to make sure I'm not tripping over some bandwidth limit," says blogger and author John Scalzi. "After that is server space: I've been running Scalzi.com for 10 years and in that time have acquired a lot of files; after that is access to analysis software and server logs, so I know where people are coming in from, what they're looking at, and how long they stay."

At least according to Paino, the biggest consideration is the level of authentic customer concern and service afforded by the hosting vendor. Of course, a perceived lack of authenticity was among the many nagging questions about Clinton's campaign. The 3 a.m. ad may have contributed to Clinton's April 22 victory in Pennsylvania, but six weeks later she was out the race.

Paino, however, remains happy with hosting provider, seven years after his own 3 a.m. test. "I was thinking of one-liners to summarize hosting and came up with this one: 'Good hosting feels like an extension of your business,'" he says. "Once I knew they could handle a 3 a.m. call, it was really easy to trust them with our business; it sounds corny, but it's true."