Why It's So Hard Finding a Good Web Host
It is a problem faced by nearly every developer, business owner, or publisher: Finding a good web host. Reliable, affordable, private web hosting is essential for businesses that want to establishing a thriving online presence. Having service down for even an hour can result in lost clients and lower sales. The primary reasons behind many unsatisfactory web hosts are reliability, predictable pricing, and protection of client privacy.
Reliability can vary wildly among web hosts. They host multiple clients -- sometimes as much as several thousand -- who each place a scheduled demand on their servers' capacity. If one of those businesses has an unanticipated spike in computing demand, such as a new product or a link from a heavy-traffic website, the whole server can be knocked offline. Few web hosting providers have the power or sophistication to reroute server traffic when demand spikes, and buying a dedicated server can cost thousands per year. It is difficult to find web hosts with those capabilities.
Fortunately, cloud computing is making it easier to pay only for the bandwidth a user actually uses. Cloud computing uses "server farms" to provide massive amounts of computing power and bandwidth
at all times. Because of the large capital investment required to offer cloud computing, those web hosts have the sophistication to reroute traffic based on which users are currently using the most
bandwidth. As these services expand in the future, it will make finding a good web host easier.
Even with web hosts who can offer on-demand computing power, it may be difficult for businesses to estimate costs for web hosting. Some services charge as much as $100 per gigabyte of extra processing power. Depending on the volume of the unexpected traffic, this could create thousands of dollars in unplanned costs. Start-up businesses could be placed in a perilous financial position if unanticipated costs accumulate. If predictable pricing is part of a good web host, even cloud computing may be unreliable for some businesses.
Privacy is an increasingly difficult issue when choosing a web host. Since the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, governments around the world have passed laws making it easier for governments and law enforcement agencies to seize or shut down web servers. When the government issues a search warrant, web hosts are powerless to resist their authority.
An illustrative example occurred in 2011. A web host based in the United States in northern Virginia was raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI was trying to shut down servers used by the hacker group Anonymous, a worldwide network of anti-government activists who had broken through firewalls at multiple government websites. Because web host servers are not dedicated to a single client -- and may actually spread data across several servers -- seizing even a single server could compromise data for multiple users. It would be like a judge issuing a search warrant for an entire apartment building instead of one apartment.
Business owners who hosted their data on the seized servers lost their websites and weeks of online revenue. Some users have still not had their data returned by the FBI. This incident underscores the difficulty in finding reliable web hosts who respect privacy -- and who operate in jurisdictions where such government actions are illegal. For this reason, many reliable web hosts now operate in Switzerland and Hong Kong where the government has no authority to seize servers.
Finding a good web host is hard, but it is not impossible. There are several web hosts who offer reliability, predictable pricing, and ensured privacy. Asking about these three issues is important when selecting a good web host. If a provider is not capable of all three, it could result in financial losses for companies using an unreliable web host, so be sure to ask when selecting a web host!