Hosting

Hosting Services

When you're shopping for web hosting services consider what you get with your bargain web hosting. Make sure you get adequate disk space and transfer bandwidth. For even modest sites you should be able to find 300MB of space and 2GB or more of monthly bandwidth. Be careful that the web hosting services include email hosting, and that spam filtering is included. Consider how you will maintain backups of your site and what you will do if/when the site goes down. Finally, look into backup services that are offered and what would be required to restore your site in the event it were completely lost.

What most hosting providers don't tell you:

Backups are not included - if the server hosting your site fails, resulting in a loss of your data, YOU are responsible for restoring the files and any databases from YOUR backups.

Security of your site is not assured - there are people out there who take great delight in "facing" web sites: replacing the home page with something completely different, and never in a good way. It's vandalism for web sites. You are on your own when it comes to preventing this from happening to your site.

If your site breaks in half...you get to keep both halves - no bargain-basement hosting is going to offer any support for your site. Their support responsibility ends when they have determined that the server is up and your domain name is accessible. Don't expect them to help you figure out any technical issues with your content.

Hosting features are generally on-size-fits-all - if you have special needs, such as a subscription-base mailing list integrated with your web site - forget about it. The vast majority of hosting providers will not make special allowances for your requirements...at least not without charging you more money for it.

What makes Elvan Business Technologies different:

We offer custom hosting. Because each site is purpose-built we can offer exactly what you need at a reasonable price. We back up each site on a daily basis to ensure that your site can be recovered with minimal down time and data loss in the event of a major problem, usually within 24 hours. We can implement real-time monitoring of specific pages on your site to check for unauthorized changes, such as "facing". For high-availability sites we can also offer backup hosting.

Consider how much time you want to spend repairing or restoring your site when it's lost. Time spent on this is time you aren't spending doing something more important, like running your own business. You get what you pay for - cheap hosting is like a carboard house: great as long as the sun is shining, but when it rains it collapses in a wet mushy puddle.

Is the Internet Safe?

The internet is a wild jungle where dangerous animals (hackers) lurk in the shadows waiting to exploit a moment of weakness for their attack. Is the internet safe? No just "no", "hell no".

We live in a time where everything is sanitized for our protection. We assume that if we are allowed to do something it must be safe. The internet is no such place. Anyone with a computer can get a high-speed internet connection, load up thier computer with juicy personal information, and connect it to the internet for every hacker and script-kiddie in the world to try to break in or disable it...and they will. Usually within a few hours.