Competing With The Big Dogs
Does size matter when choosing the company to host your website? Does a well-known company automatically mean it is the best web hosting option? Not necessarily. Before you jump on the big name bandwagon, you should explore all options available. It could save you time and money in the long run. Here's why it might be better to choose a small company.
1. Greater Customization Options for competing with other hosting service providers
In most cases, a smaller company will be the best web hosting option. Why? For the simple fact hosting services can be customized to suit the needs of your company. You might not need everything that a big company is offering. And think about it: how much capacity are you truly going to require? If you choose the big name, you'll end up paying for massive amounts of space you don't even use.
2. Better Support
If you run into trouble, will that big company have your back? Smaller Web hosting companies can provide a higher level of customer service for a simple reason: they have less customers to deal with. Case in point:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers different levels of support: Basic, Developer, Business, and Enterprise. All levels come with 24/7 customer service, comprehensive support forums, and a host of white papers and documentation. However, if you opt for the free account, you might find yourself waiting a while before you hear from a tech. The developer plan ($49/month) promises contact within 12 hours, while enterprise clients (dependent on usage, but no less than $15,000/month) can expect no more than 15 minutes to pass before they hear back from a tech.
3. Less down-time
While it's true that Amazon's hosting services doesn't often experience problems with outages, they do still occur. Back in October of 2012, AWS was down for several hours, affecting popular websites like Reddit, Pinterest, Airbnb, FourSquare, and a host of others. Obviously, these customers were less than pleased. In July of that same year, a major storm caused more downtime for Netflix, Instagram, an Pinterest.
Local web hosting companies don't usually have this problem. For example, Cervalis has been serving clients for about 12 years and has never had a problem with servers going down.
The Smaller Service Is The Best Web Hosting Option
When it comes to web hosting, bigger isn't always better — in fact, that's rarely the case. Smaller Web Hosting companies can devote more time to your business. It's that simple. Even better, a smaller hosting company may offer a dedicated project manager (not unheard of). This project manager can, in turn, make sure that all of your problems are addressed right away.
Competing With The Big Dogs: You won't get that with Amazon.
The bottomline: do your homework. Research the big names alongside the little names, and look at what other customers are saying. Some Web hosting companies truly do need large capacity cloud-based hosting. If the idea of someone working with you one-on-one to customize your experience is appealing to you (which it should be), you'll want to steer clear of giant cloud-based solutions like AWS. At the end of the day, this is your experience and no one else's. Only you can decide what's right for you and your business.
