BenBlog

Can you afford your business to have this image on it’s homepage?

I often get questions about why someone shouldn’t use a budget web host.  These are web hosts that you commonly see hosting for $10 a month with amazing promises of 100GB of storage and unlimited transfer.  They have ads all over the place, in magazines, on Superbowl Commercials, and online advertising on almost every google search.  Their names are familiar and usually say something quirky such as “supergreathostdaddy.com”.

The other day I had a friend call and say that their website that was hosted at GoDaddy went down.  I gathered their information and called GoDaddy to see if I couldn’t help alleviate the situation.

When I asked their technical support why this site was offline they mentioned that his account was $20 past balance and that they had removed the hosting option from his account.  Amazed that they would remove their site for such a small balance, I asked that if the $20 was resolved if they would reinstate his hosting, they agreed.  Then I asked if I would be able to retrieve the files only to find out that GoDaddy had removed them.  They were more than happy to restore the backup copy that they “Most probably” had, for a fee of $159.

Most reputable webhosts will maintain multiple backups of your site and can restore your data with a quick call to their support team, and at no cost.  Backups are an integral part of any hosting package, normally they only take a few minutes to restore, and it’s just simply good service.

Another feature that they love to offer is their amazing amounts of transfer that they allow.  However, if you do actually experience any real traffic, they’ll pull your site offline as it’s too taxing on their servers as well as the bandwidth is costing them much more than you are paying annually.  This happens quite often actually and in my opinion is a bad business decision.  You want your site to have traffic.  You build it with this in mind. You want people to use your site and see it’s content.  Finally you get some good press, people are visiting your site, your name recognition is gaining, and then they rip your site down for actually asking for what they promised.

Another point that is worth considering is the theory that shared hosting is much akin to living in an apartment building.  When looking for an apartment to reside your home or business in, would you consider a run down, overcrowded building with shady neighbors who don’t lock their windows at night?

Many of these webhosts do not take the time to get to know their clientele, and therefore are unaware of what is being hosted on their (sometimes outdated) servers.  These servers are overcrowded to maximize profits per server, often with 1000′s of sites on each server, many shoddily coded and open for malicious attack.

Is your neighbor hosting porn?  Are they running a file server pushing out illegal music / movies / software? Are they using the same mailserver that you use to send clients critical email to send out spam?

It’s anybody’s guess.

One last point that comes to mind is customer service.  Many of these companies simply cannot afford to have actual people answer the phone, much less one who knows you and knows your business and it’s needs.  Often times you’ll have your call transferred to a foreign company that has been outsourced to take care of support, if you’re so lucky to even find a phone number on their website to call when you need help.

It all goes back to the idea of “you get what you pay for”.  If you spend more on your coffee each day than you do on making sure your business’ online presence is secure and always available, you may want to reconsider your business plan.

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Thanksgiving is a time for remembering the amazing things in our life that we are thankful for, eating copious amounts of food, acting kindly to strangers, and of course football. Let’s think about football for a second. On each side of the line of scrimmage you have large blockers and defensive linemen trying to get the precious pigskin from the quarterback before he lands a reception to the receiver. Without the offensive line the quarterback doesn’t stand a chance against the rushing defensive line. He’s toast.

Quite similar to an online transaction really.

In the online world, you have the football (your credit card), the passer (you), and the defensive linemen (spammers / phishers / badguys). Depending on how you protect yourself, you can either make a successful pass to the receiver (amazon.com) or you can get nailed by the bad guys. What type of protection do you have for your precious information?

58% of shoppers this year intend on buying at least one gift online, while 70% overall are planning on filling their entire list from online retailers. In preparation of this deluge of transactions the bad guys have been hard at work as well. These guys are busy sending out millions upon millions of spam messages trying to hawk their fake Rolexes and their Viagra pills. Some of them are harmless, simply delete the mail. Others, however, contain viruses and malware.

Attackers will be creating fake e-commerce sites hoping users will voluntarily hand over their information, a socially engineered cyberattack, as opposed to more elaborate, technical methods in a cybercriminal’s arsenal. and even spoofed websites that look and feel exactly like the one’s your used to buying from.

If you fall for the last one, you’re basically handing your credit cards into the hands of evil doers.

I encourage online purchases, and will do almost all of my shopping from the comfort of my living room this year, with the exception of a few items. But every year I hear horror stories of identity theft and computer corruption. So, go ahead and pick up that new TV for your lovely husband, after all, the lawn didn’t mow itself. But make sure that take some basic procedures into play first.

- Do not leave your wireless network at home open.
- Do not click directly on links embedded in emails. Copy and paste them into a browser first, and
make sure that it’s really amazon.com and not amazzon.com or any other misspellings.
- When possible, use secure services that offer fraud protection such as PayPal.
- Incorporate an awesome spam filter, not one that is software based but rather service based. I
prefer Postini.

If you’re an online retailer, make sure that you are behind a managed firewall in a secure data center and using a secure connection. It’s only fair to the people helping you put presents under the tree!

Happy Holidays, and safe shopping!
-Ben

(Oh, and if you’re interested, I’m hoping Santa brings me a new pair of Infinity Kappa 462.9cfp speakers, found on Ebay and they accept Pay Pal )

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