Hosting



Anyone working with the Internet needs to consider different kinds of hosting providers and the proper service for different needs. If you look for reviews and recommendations on the Internet you often find general reviews without regard to the specific way that you may want to use the hosting service. We spent considerable time researching different hosting services for various needs for ourselves and our customers, and have found some services and partners that we work with and can recommend. Please note that in some cases we do receive remuneration if you choose to use their service - after all, we’re in business to make money as are they. Please let us know if you find the service less than expected since we do reassess our recommendations periodically.

We believe that hosting can be classified into some principal categories:
  • Website Hosting for simple Business and Personal Sites
  • Hosting for e-Commerce Sites
  • Hosting for Resellers
  • Managed Services Hosting for Businesses in Asia


Website Hosting for Simple Sites



Simple sites that primarily provide information and do not use interactive applications are the most common websites. Most small businesses use these to provide key information on their businesses, and to obtain contacts from web searches. These sites require very limited bandwidth and storage. Consequently, these needs are addressed by a wide variety of hosting services, including even ISPs and domain registration companies. In most cases it doesn’t matter where the site is hosted, so find the least expensive providers that meet your quality level. In other words, even though your company (or your residence) may be in Asia, you can choose to host your site where you get the best price and service levels, which in most cases means North America.

For this service you should be interested in a low monthly price for a given storage and bandwidth per month, and usually many email accounts will be included as well. Expect them to start as low as US$5 to $7 per month, depending on the extent of your site and whether you’re willing to pay for 12 months in advance. (We’d give the technical details for the lowest price per month but this keeps changing with competition.) If you keep your picture sizes small and have few pages then you can usually use the lowest tier.

We generally don’t find it worthwhile to pay the higher costs for Australian or Asian providers, and instead choose to use a company such as iPower (iPowerweb).

By the way, if you have a simple site and want to sell only a few products, then you can have the descriptions of the products (even downloadable ones) and use a hosted shopping cart to provide the purchasing capability. We have found that e-junkie provides good service and reporting when you start out and don’t have the need for a more extensive e-commerce site.

Hosting for e-Commerce Sites



Hosting for e-commerce requires that you consider the number of products and associated pictures on your site, as well as the hosting company’s ability to deal with the number of buyers you will have. An e-commerce site requires much storage than a simple information site, because it must store the application, the database, the pictures and descriptions of the products, and it must handle the number of simultaneous visitors and buyers on your site. With a small site and few products you can probably use a shared service, but as you grow then you will need to consider a more comprehensive service, or even a dedicated hosted server.

Service location can make a difference for e-commerce sites, since location can affect the cost for bandwidth and can affect your customers’ experience. If you have many products and all of your customers are from a particular country then it is possible that your customers could get better response from a site located in the same country. However, if the provider doesn’t have sufficient bandwidth and if costs are high then you will probably do just as well looking for the most cost-effective service (compare cost for service level and quality).

You can choose between a hosting service that allows you to build out your own e-commerce site or that provides a shared e-commerce service.
  • An e-commerce hosting service provides more storage, more bandwidth and better guarantee of service quality for processing transactions. It may even bundle in one or more dedicated IP addresses; this IP address is important for you to provide secure access to your site for processing payments (it’s “secure” in this respect if you see the padlock on your browser at the site, enabled by an SSL Certificate). We have found both iPower and Hostgator to provide good service for smaller e-commerce sites. If you use Magento as your shopping cart software then you may want to use a site such as AspirationHosting, which is supposedly tuned to accommodate the higher processing and storage that Magento seems to require. Be prepared to find and load the shopping cart software, customize the pages, code the links to the payments processor (so you can accept credit card payments) and then add the information on your products and services, and manage the resulting sales.
  • A shared e-commerce service provides a combination of application, server and bandwidth, and thus saves you from having to load the application and build out pages. Instead you start by using generic pages and concentrate on adding your products and services. You use the service’s payment platform and their management back end to maintain your products and track sales. This is a great way to start out if you want to concentrate on your business rather than the technical details of an e-commerce site. Volusion is a very reputable provider of this service.


Website Hosting for Resellers



If you develop software for other companies or help companies to build their websites then you may want to consider offering them hosting as well. You can do so by reselling the hosting service offered by other companies. Don’t think you want to have your own server in your house and a broadband connection because your service quality won’t match your customers’ expectations. Instead rely on other companies to have the up-front expense of buying the servers and the bandwidth, and you just resell their service. It’s really simple and many companies cater specifically to people such as you. They generally even have a range of service levels that depend on the number of customers you have and the kind of sites they will be using. Good providers allow you to upgrade your package as your business grows.

We work with Hostgator for customers using both simple and smaller e-commerce sites, and we recommend their service. We tried using some of the companies that provide good hosting for simple websites but found that they didn’t really understand the needs of resellers and handling multiple sites and customers within one account.

Managed Services Hosting in Asia



We also work with businesses that have special hosting requirements, such as needing their own dedicated servers or even racks into which they put their own servers, storage, network gear, etc. Many companies find that they like being able to deal with a local provider and with someone they can hold responsible for quality. Thus, your choice of provider probably depends on your specific country.

In Singapore we can recommend Readyspace, and in Singapore and in many Asian countries we recommend Webvisions. Both companies cater to small to larger businesses, mostly those that desire managed hosting of some nature.