For Your Customers` Sake, Be an Ethical Web Host - Deliver the Performance They Need

The first point to consider under performance is uptime. What good is a website if it is not up and running? The lack up uptime is a big reason for businesses to switch web hosts. By this we mean no more than an hour, total, of downtime for a site in a one-month period -- and the better you can do with this, the happier your customers will be. To quote one writer who switched web hosts six times in a one-year period, "Almost anything can be forgiven as long as sites are up and running, as close to 100 percent of the time as possible."

Customers get antsy when their website is down because it can set off a nasty domino effect. If the site is part of a webring (and many sites still are), it might get automatically removed from the ring if it is down for too long. Sites will also get dropped from search engines if they are down for too long. And visitors who come to a site and see that it is down too often will revise their bookmarks accordingly.

The second point to consider under performance is your own servers. Yes, it is understandable that the more websites you can put on one server, the more profit you will make. However, the sites that are on your servers not only need to stay up; they need to perform well. If your clients' customers have problems accessing the website, whether the site is down or merely slow, you will hear about it.

Along these lines, if your servers are filling up, it makes good business sense to replace them or add more before they are completely full. After all, if you have so many customers that your servers are filling up, it means that your business is booming. If your business is booming, you can certainly afford new equipment!

Another server-related point concerns changes and upgrades you may want to make. You may think the best way to help your customers is to put these changes in place as quickly as possible. While you may be excited about getting these new capabilities up and running, your customers are more concerned about keeping their sites up and running. Therefore, do not test your changes and upgrades on production servers. You need to know all of the possible side effects of any upgrade from having actually tested them out -- that way, you can warn and inform your customers in advance. Simply telling your customers that the system is running slowly because you are in the process of making upgrades is not good enough, and customers deserve better.

Next: Keeping Customers Informed is Key >>
 

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