hosting: one question

other than bandwidth, what should you look out for when your site becomes big?

 

1) security (is your server/software safe?)
2) technical support (can your hosting company help you ?)
3) backups (do you have _any_ backups of your data ?)
4) quality of customer service (does your hosting co treat you good ? this can become very important)

IMHO

 

1. Speed
2. Security
3. Reliability/Uptime
4. Support

 

Support and Backups are most important for me.

Once your site becomes a mega-site, you have to rely 100% on your host for backup.

Also if I have a huge site, I will only host it with established hosts...you never know when a smaller player may go down.

 

If I had a mega site, I would host it ion my fully managed dedicated server

 

ok, and when do you realize that you need to make the switch from shared to dedicated??

 

After you start to getting enough money to have dedicated server

 

I always look for 24/7 support in case something goes down, DNS server, etc.
Also backups and a good fire supression system ease my mind.
But mostly will the server handle the load I expect to put on it? If you have lots of MySQL queries and processor/memory intensive stuff, will it handle it? Send the host an email and ask what the default configuration is of MySQL. Most hosts don't optimize it, so even medium-sized sites get bogged down with the server not being able to keep up with the sql queries.

 

Uptime is crucial for a big site. At least 99.9% or else you will lose customers. Then speed of course.

 

You should opt for managed vps or dedicated server hosting having daily/weekly backups.

 

for some reason, hosting is very confusing for me. need to do some reading.

thanks for the info guys

 

Then, get a managed service if you opt for VPS or Dedicated.