How to cut through the web hosting BS! This presentation was what Peer1 presented to the WordCamp community in Cardiff, educating them on what to look out for when talking to hosting companies and how to siv through the crazy marketing terms that exists in the industry. Enjoy!

1. WordCamp Presentation How to cut through web hosting BS! For more assistance, contact Peer1 – +44 (0) 800 840 7499

2. WordCamp UK Introduction to Hosting Options Shared, Dedicated, Managed Hosting! Horses for Courses, who needs what? Terms Hosting Companies use. Peer 1 and ServerBeach

3. What is hosting?

4. Hosting options Shared Virtual Dedicated Managed Fully Managed Cloud

5. Shared Hosting Advantages Cheap Easy to setup Flexible term contracts Disadvantages Unreliable Limited functionality Be careful of SLAs Suitable for Start ups Small static sites Simple Blogs Not suitable for Large sites ecommerce Media heavy content

6. Virtual Private Servers Advantages More Control Greater Options Flexible term contracts Disadvantages Possibly unreliable Technical Setups Not suitable for Large sites Media heavy content Ecommerce Security compliance Suitable for Medium sized websites Blogs Technical People who know what they are doing.

12. Look out for “fair use policies”

14. What is your utilisation as a hosting company and how do you deal with outages should they occur?

17. To achieve 100% uptime, the hosting solution can not have a single point of failure

18. On top of this, you need to consider geographical redundancy (in case a data centre blows up)

20. Ask what happens if the data centre blows up!

21. How can you offer 100% uptime for £5 per month? Surely you’re losing money?!

24. Ensure the support teams native tongue is the same as yours to avoid communication issues

26. Where is your support team located and do they have access to my account?

27. What happens if the hardware breaks?

29. If downtime occurs, what are they legally obliged to do and do they credit you for outages?

30. Who’s responsibility is to report an outage? Theirs or yours?

31. If they can get away with it, will they?

32. Do they publish their SLA’s on their website or do you have to request it?

33. If you have to request it, what are they trying to hide?

35. A bit about Peer1...

41. If you have any questions, please call: +44 (0) 800 840 7499