Keep Your Website Hosting Up-to-Date

The other day I noticed a crew of men working on a street corner. They were un-installing an old pay phone. It has been obvious for a long time why no one really needs pay phones anymore - mobile telephones and connectivity have become so pervasive and so inexpensive that pay phones just aren't up to date anymore. No one is willing to pay for that outdated service of dropping change into a stationary phone. So the old pay phone was removed and probably won't ever be installed anywhere ever again.

The same ''outdating'' that is demonstrated by the old pay phone can occur with your web hosting account and services. Over time, the service or server that was once state-of-the-art is now outdated and needs to be upgraded. So what things should a web hosting customer look for in their hardware or services to know if any updating may be necessary? Here's a short list.

1. The resources on your web hosting account are constantly over-subscribed - If you are exceeding your account's specifications - such as disk space, bandwidth, number of email boxes - then you should look at upgrading. Web hosting account specifications (like computers in general) are always marching upward. What was a generous allotment of disk space and bandwidth four years ago may now be too small for modern applications and databases. Also, certain types of accounts will naturally provide fewer resources per hosting account. For example deeply discounted or free web hosting will often have the bare minimum resources to keep a simple site working. You will also find that most web hosting providers offer account types specifically for customers who need more resources. Stuart Melling, a co-founder at website hosting provider 34SP.com described the company's business account which is intended for more resource intensive websites, ''We know that certain clients want a shared account, but need the most resources and uptime available. 34SP.com business hosting is powered by ultra reliable quad and dual Xeon Intel processors. This creates low user contention rates and ensures maximum uptime and speed for a website business ensuring constant availability at over 99.9 percent uptime.'' You should look for an account type such as this if you need greater reliability and resources in a shared account.

2. Your website loads too slowly - While there may be a variety of reasons that your website loads too slowly, it is perfectly reasonable to ask your web hosting provider to help. Legacy servers - especially for shared hosting accounts - may be splitting too few resources (usually RAM) between to many customers on one server. It is natural for a web hosting company to place as many hosting customers on one server as possible in a shared hosting environment. However, as the number of websites vying for those limited resources rises, the speed of execution for each site to load is reduced. If this is the case for your hosting account, it may be time to consider a more robust account type, or request a move to a server that has either more resources available - or fewer customers contending for the scarce RAM and disk space.

There is another reason to be very aware of your site speed: Google has recently announced that it will use website speed as a factor in search rankings. You can view the original and Official Google Blog Post here. I explaining the decision to factor speed into its search algorithm Google stated, ''Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed - that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.'' The blog post link above also contains a list of tools to measure your site's speed.

3. Your website is frequently unavailable - It would seem obvious, but if your hosting is prone to failure then it is time to update or move on. While almost every web hosting company promises fantastic reliability and uptime, there are differences between various hosting providers and also within each provider on the different hosting packages provided. Generally speaking, the most reliable hosting platform should be a dedicated server, followed by a virtual server (VPS), then a business account, and finally a shared web hosting account. If you are interested in quantifying the uptime or reliability of your hosting, you can use a tool like Alertra. This service will monitor your website and notify you via email - if and when it ever fails. That way you have a precise measure of how often your website is down. Alertra describes their service as follows: ''Our website monitor service goes beyond simple web monitoring and server pings by checking shared and dedicated server availability, performance and security externally from our worldwide network of monitoring stations located in carrier-class data centers.''

If you are not getting the reliability and uptime that you need for your website, then it is perfectly reasonable to seek a more robust hosting solution. Remember, the only one who will most likely care how up-to-date your web hosting platform is - is you.