Mystic Liquid

Mystic Liquid has the fortunate opportunity to being the only website design company in Scranton that offers search engine optimization with the amount of experience we have. With that being the case, we get the chance to hear from a lot of businesses tell us their horror stories of dealing with some of the lesser experienced web design companies. Needless to say, we hear a lot of talk and most of the time that talk is way off base. Just last week, we had a client tell us one company told them that the web hosting provider is not an important detail to the design of a website. Can anything be further from the truth?

I like to think that web hosting is actually a pretty critical aspect of not only small business website design but also the core principle of search engine optimization. If you go with the wrong web host company, your website faces numerous potential issues such as website down time. Don’t even get me started on what can happen to your rankings if a Google spider decides to visit your site the day you are down due to hosting problems.

One of the first things you want to establish is the needs and purpose of your website. For example, if you are designing a simple website, like a small informational website for example, almost any web hosting plan can meet your needs. If you are designing a mid-level website or plan to sell product or services from your website, then we recommend you put some thought into what your website will be like and which web hosting company can meet its need.

Some of the things we look out for when choosing web hosting companies are:

· Excellent server technology - Shared hosting services utilize multiplexed equipment. It is important to ensure that the server and server technology used can accommodate the number of users on your particular server.

· System administrators –You want knowledgeable system administrators operating your hosting company’s technology.

· Network redundancy – If you decide to go with a shared hosting package, make sure the company has multiple connections. In other words, network redundancy ensures that if one connection goes down, all traffic is then re-routed through another connection.

· Network connectivity – The faster, the better! We want the fastest Internet connection possible. With a shared hosting package, you are competing with other users for resources. You better have at least T3 connection using less than 50% of available bandwidth.

One method we use to find a reliable webhosting company is to visit review websites and forums to see the opinions of other website designers. Website host review websites and forums such as Webhostingtalk or FindMyHosting.com are two of more popular ones.

Both of these forums give additional information to help you choose which webhosting company works best for your needs and technical specifications. For example, FindMyHosting gives information about how much bandwidth and hard drive space is required for your website specifications and price range. They then provide a list of web hosting plans that fall those specified ranges.

One final tip when dealing with web hosting companies is to find any information concerning banned or penalized IP addresses through any particular web hosts. If you share the same IP address as a website banned or penalized due to spam or hosting illegal adult content, expect your website to suffer the same penalization.