Evaluating a web hosting service is a scary business. I haven’t found a reliable way to pre-judge the quality of a host. There are so called ranking services, but according to a post on the Dreamhost weblog many or most of those “unbiased” services actually sell their rankings.

If you have a good web designer, you can probably trust the designer’s recommendation or let the designer take care of hosting for you. Some independend designers will point you toward a company and coach you through the purchase process. Or, most web design firms will be happy to take care of all the hosting process for you. That can be either a good or a bad thing. It will typically cost you more than arranging your own hosting. How can that be a good thing?

A web design firm will typically use a good quality service. An established firm will have zero tolerance for a flaky web host. So the good news is that you have someone to do your evaluation for you. In the Wild, Wild West of web hosting that is a very valuable service. Also, since the design firm has worked with the host for years its people will know the system, how to get help, how to change settings, add email addresses and a whole host of little things that cost a great deal of time to learn.

The other benefit of letting a web designer take care of your hosting is that you don’t have to. Letting experts do what they do well may cost a bit more but it will put problems in the expert’s hands and save you time. Managing a good web host isn’t rocket science but it is one more task on your already full plate of responsibilities.

There are two down sides to having a web design company arrange hosting for you. The first is pretty universal. The web design firm will typically mark up the pure hosting costs. You are not only buying web hosting but expertise. If that is important, you can sleep easier knowing that the inevitable problems you will run into can be quickly taken care of by somebody who has seen the same problems before. But, buying through a web design firm will cost you more. If you want to be totally hands o, and learn that aspect of web design ,that’s a negative; as it is if absolute low cost is vital to you. This is a legitimate case where you can weight the costs vs. the benefits. There are legitimate arguments either way. You pay more. You get more. Your choice.

The other problem is something I would be very, very careful about. Instead of setting up your account for you on a host, the firm will resell a shared hosting account through their own private branding. The idea for the design firm is the same, provide a value added service that can be charged for.

Where the potential problems come in is if you want to move away from the web design company and either run your own site or switch design service providers. Your website isn’t a separate entitiy that you have control over. Even if you don’t want to move your hosting this would be a problem is if the web design firm suddenly folds. It happens. I know two people fairly well who got burned this way.

With the web design firm holding the account, you don’t actually own access to the real web hosting service. Instead, your site is hosted in a single account run by the design firm along with a number of their other clients. Put simply, you don’t own your site.

If the web design firm is reputable and good, that isn’t a problem. They should gracefully give your access to your site or at least download the files for you. But the times I’ve gotten contracts for site redesigns run by this kind of company have almost all been nightmares. I’ve had to threaten legal action to get access to client’s files. I’ve seen sites just disappear when the design company owner ended up in jail or skipped town. I’ve had to wait weeks for access to site files or for the firm to let go of a domain name pointer. I’ve had such companies charge several hours time to do the few minutes work involved in transferring a site. I’ve even seen a company claim that it owned the client’s e-newsletter mailing list.

So, lesson number 1 is to make sure that no matter who sets up the site or how it is paid for, you actually own access to your own website. If you have any doubts, ask. If you don’t actually own your own website, be very, very careful.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 18th, 2006 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.