Top 7 challenges with running a website

Dan Harrison — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:00:13 +0000

When I’m talking to people about what I do, one of the most common misconceptions I face is that there’s still a strong belief that running a website is easy to do. Running a successful website is far from easy, it’s blooming hard work!

So I’ve put together a list of the top 7 problems and issues you’ll soon discover when running a website. My goal is not to put you off, but to highlight that it takes experience, skill and bucket-loads of effort to sustain a great website.

1) Web hosting downtime and poor response times

Your web hosting will go down at some point. Forget those claims of 99.9% uptime guarantees from your hosting company, which mean nothing anyway. Sometimes the server might still be accessible, but the page loads so slowly that your website becomes unusable.

Just accept it. When you least want your website to go down, it will go down. The trick is to find a web host who is proactive about their server management, namely that they’re already working on fixes by the time you’ve noticed your website is not working.

2) Random drops in visitors

Any seasoned website owner will agree with this problem. At some point your visitor levels (and/or sales) will just drop for no apparent reason. You’ll spend hours looking over the statistics trying to work out why. Sometimes you might be able to determine that you’ve had a a random drop in rankings in the search engines.

Get up, dust yourself down, and move on. Often it’s better to spend time getting more visitors rather than establishing the actual cause of the drop.

3) You get demotivated and bored

When you’ve been running a website for a while, you do lose interest. Perhaps your earnings aren’t increasing as quickly as you’d like? Perhaps you’re not making any sales? Perhaps you’ve run out of ideas? It’s usually people who persevere through the low periods that become successful.

Try to find ways to inject new ideas and inspiration into your website to give you fresh motivation. I recently wrote a great article on how to come up with fresh ideas.

4) You’re being sued

If you have a website that allows visitor-generated content, such as reviews, comments or forum posts, then there’s every chance that you’ll end up with something offensive on your website. Offensive remarks, in their various guises, can lead to law suits.

Moderate all visitor-generated content. No exceptions. If the content sounds as if it might be an issue, remove or reject it. Moderating user-created content is hard work, but it’s cheaper than being sued.

5) You have no time to update your website

Updating your website includes many aspects, such as moderating comments, adding new articles, adding new products, adjusting the site design, etc. Great websites are constantly evolving and growing.

If you don’t have the time to update your website, then hire someone, be it by outsourcing, via a contract or an employee. If your time is worth more focused on other tasks, then it’s worth spending a little money to keep your website fresh and up-to-date.

6) You need to promote your website

If you want your website to grow, you need to promote your website. However, promoting a website is easily one of the most time consuming aspects of running a website. You need to spend time getting links to your website, you need to create a presence on social networking platforms, you need to establish relationships with other individuals in your community, you need to spend time on marketing materials, etc. The list just goes on.

Just because you have a website, it doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get visitors. Promotion is hard work, and there are no quick solutions either.

7) Competition and copycats

Once you have a great website, it’s not long before someone copies you or starts doing something that’s very similar to you. It’s often because someone wants to replicate your success for themselves. However, they usually don’t realise that they’d be better off doing something different and unique.

Don’t resort to childish behavior (as tempting as it might be to throw a tantrum)! Sometimes you might have a legal case if there’s a copyright dispute. However, I’ve found that working with the competition can yield some great results. This includes advertising exchanges, selling adverts on your website, possibly selling your website to the competition, or even buying the competition!

Any more challenges?

These are the challenges that I’ve personally faced with running my portfolio. What challenges have you encountered with running a website?

Getting the best from your Web Hosting Company

Dan Harrison — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:00:17 +0000

If you’ve got a website that you rely on for your business, having reliable uptime is pretty important. The vast majority of hosting companies are not proactive about ensuring their servers are in tip-top condition. That’s understandable as being proactive is expensive. If a hosting company’s costs are higher, they need to charge the customer more.

Given that many customers choose hosting based on price, you can understand why a hosting company would decide not to invest in being proactive. The hosting company might therefore just react to problems instead. However, just because your hosting company is more reactive than proactive, it doesn’t mean you need to go elsewhere.

100% uptime, but your website still doesn’t load

So many web hosting companies claim they have 99.9% uptime, but that just refers to the server being online (i.e. powered on). That metric does not consider if the server is performing badly (i.e. slowly) or if just the database or web server daemons are dead.

For example, a hosting company could theoretically say they have 100% uptime every month, but have 5 days when the server is taking 10 times as long to serve up a page, or there could be an issue where Apache or MySQL aspect of the web server crashes but the machine itself is up and running. So the machine itself is up 100%, but the server is not doing what it’s supposed to do 100% of the time.

How to work with your web host

Regardless of what problems you experience with your hosting company, here are some tips to get the best from your hosting company.

Read their support documentation – Some commonly asked questions are usually answered in the Frequently Asked Questions or KnowledgeBase type areas of the hosting companies website. See if that information helps you before you raise a ticket.
Monitor notifications of scheduled downtime – There will be times when your hosting company will need to upgrade hardware or software. There will be somewhere on their site where they announce such scheduled downtime, such as on a blog or forum.
Don’t abuse the hosting staff – When you’re frustrated with something, it’s all too easy to take it out on the web hosting staff. Try not to lose your cool. Typically hosting staff will get lots of angry messages from users, regardless if those angry messages are deserved. When raising help tickets, try to be objective, explain the problem, and then explain your desired solution. The staff are human-beings too!
Be grateful for the help you get – If someone helps you, thank the staff member who helped you. It will make their job more pleasant. You might even get better service from them in the future as a result.
Research the problem – for more technical and complex problems, i.e. something other than a dead server, do as much research on the web as you can. Any additional information you can find will greatly help the support staff when they resolve your problem. The staff know a lot, but they don’t know everything. Providing them with detail will save them time too, meaning a quicker resolution for you.
Don’t threaten to leave – You’ll get nowhere threatening the hosting company to fix the problem otherwise you’ll leave. Chances are, your money makes very little difference to their bottom line, so the threat has no weight. If you’re not happy with the service, then just move hosting companies.

Conclusion

Switching hosting companies is hard work, particularly if you have more than just a few websites. Rather than switch hosts, it’s well worth establishing a rapport with hosting company, as it benefits both you and them. And in case you wondered, I strongly recommend Crucial Paradigm, which is who I use for hosting my 30+ websites. I typically get a response from help staff within an hour or two! That’s fast.

Dan Harrison » hosting