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.

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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