In the competitive world of web host marketing one of the common themes that’s become popular is this idea of “Unlimited Hosting”, where you can use Unlimited Bandwidth and Disk Space and never have to pay more than $9.95 a month or $14.95 a month, etc…
Depending on what you’re hosting and how important uptime, availability and backups are the “Unlimited Plans” may work for you, but if you’re running an online business if you don’t properly plan out your hosting setup you’re being Penny Wise and Pound Foolish.
When structuring your Online Business or Ecommerce Webstore you should classify different pieces of your site as to their importance in three areas:
1. Is this information CRITICAL to be backed up on tape and stored off site from your hosting provider every day?
2. Does this information need to be ALWAYS available?
3. How important is it if this information is occasionally on a slow server?
For example it’s VITAL that your ecommerce transaction data be on a server with RAID redundancy and backed up each night via a high quality tape backup and stored offsite. A single data loss anytime during the life of your business will easily cost you more than the cost savings you saw from cutting corners on protecting your critical data.
On the other hand if you have a blog that demos new products via video as they come in to your store and you have locally backed up copies of your videos on DVD and your hard drive, having off site tape backups of those videos isn’t nearly as critical as your transaction data. Sure losing them would be a pain, but not long term damaging to your business.
Every online business owner should map out the type of data they have and ensure they’re structuring their environment to best suit there needs. If you’re just starting out it may take you a while to eat up 500 Megs or a Gig of disk space, but as your site grows and you have more and more content it’s critical that you start segmenting your content to the right spot. Otherwise you’ll be tempted to look for a lower cost solution so you’re not paying huge disk space feed to backup your videos and you’ll end up putting your entire business at risk by moving your data to a low quality or lesser quality host.
Hosting providers could also look at segmenting their offering so they can provide someone alternatives so to both protect their valuable data and online business without wasting a lot of resources on the wrong content.
About Rick Wilson
Rick Wilson is the Executive Vice President for Miva Merchant a popular online shopping cart software.
Rick has been with Miva Merchant since 1999 when he began at the original Miva Corporation as an outside sales representative and took over as Vice President of Sales in 2002 and ultimately as Executive Vice President in 2007.
Rick's more than 12 years of executive-level sales and marketing experience also includes his tenure as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Providence Systems, a privately held sales training company. At Providence Systems, Rick developed and executed the sales and marketing strategies that helped lead a successful corporate turnaround between 1998 and 2002.
Through his WHIR blog, Rick will cover ecommerce trends, products and services from the perspective of the online merchant. He will focus on best practice thinking, tools that help them improve their business and be on the look-out for the information that provides merchants the competitive edge to be successful.
No related posts.
