Web Hosting - What Not To Do    

As a business owner or technology decision maker you should be concerned with projecting a professional image to visitors who will be a mixture of existing and potential clients.
Hosting your website on a low cost or even worse - free hosting service is a recipe for disaster.

Low cost hosting generally provides you with little or no support, they are often here today gone tomorrow, and are notoriously hard to contact. Imagine having an important email that you are waiting on, and being at the mercy of a problem that may not be fixed for days at a time, all to save a few dollars a month!

Creydall Systems provides a service that guarantees 100% uptime for your email by having many redundant servers located in different physical locations around the world. So even if your mail server is offline, email is not lost.
This is a standard feature and only available for our CRYSYS network support clients.

If you are in any way serious about having your web site become an extension of your existing business then a dedicated IP address is important.

Picture this, you spend time and effort to promote your web site, you start to get visitors flowing through and things are starting to pick up. Then suddenly nothing, you do a quick search on google and cannot even find your domain name.
After paying an expert a fair sum of money to come in and diagnose what is wrong, he explains to you that an Adult entertainment website that shares your IP address has been caught trying to manipulate the search engine results, their domain name and IP address (which is also your IP address) have been banned from the search engines.

This means you will have to start all over again after possibly spending thousands of dollars on your existing web sites marketing. Learn from other peoples mistakes and pay a few extra dollars a month for a dedicated IP address.
It is also important if you require a SSL certificate to encrypt information between host and client (server and Visitors PC)

So just say you have ignored the above advice and gotten the cheapest hosting you can find, your web site is hosted in the U.S. instead of Australia, and your visitors have to put up with flashing adverts and the occasional pop up, but at least you save $30 per month.

After spending weeks working on your web site, you finally get it looking the way you want, and you are quite happy with the results. Then without warning the website just disappears.

No problems, you decide to ring the phone number on the web site which is subject to international rates (there goes the initial saving). After 30 minutes on hold, you get a message that they are unable to take your call at the moment, can you please leave a message, so you leave a message. 1, 2, 3, 4 days pass and nothing, so you call them again. Same thing happens again you get a recording to leave a message. You get frustrated, thinking to yourself, I'm trying to run a business here.

Unfortunately this is a common occurrence, and the cheaper you go the more likely this is to happen. Now I am not saying that you can pay lots of money and are guaranteed a great service, there are rogues at all price points.
What I am recommending here is that you go with a local business that can be held accountable for their service.

An example is we only provide hosting services to Adelaide businesses located within the metropolitan Adelaide area.

This means that our customers always have the option of getting in the car and visiting our office and demand to know what is going on with their web site, something that cannot be done with an offshore web host.
This means you remain in control of what is going on at all times.

In summary if you can pick up the phone or drive to your web hosts premises then you are ahead of the pack already. While saving $30 per month is not really a big deal for your business. Having your website disappear or have constant problems could have a big effect both in terms of your profitability and your stress levels. So the moral of the story is don't skimp on something that does not cost a lot of money to start with and can be vital to your businesses survival.