Are you getting good value for the money you are spending to keep your blog up and running? Are you overspending on tools for the position your list is in this month?
Hosting can run anywhere between $0.01 (yes, you read that right) and $20.00 per month per website. An autoresponder can cost anywhere between free (yes, you read that right) and $75.00 per month or more depending on your list size. So if you’re beginning, do you think positively and buy the largest package available believing that you will grow exponentially this month or do you sign up for what you need today and upgrade as you need it?
Are there other factors to consider besides price in choosing your services? Some of the factors that might be worth considering would be ease of use, flexibility, support, availability, scalability and speed. Does the tool do what you need it to? If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter how much it costs – it’s not worth your time to mess with it!
For a beginner, support is essential! Do you enter a ticket into a help desk system to be answered …. someday (which is not a day of the week) or does a human with a pulse answer your request? When I’m learning something new, I find it to be quite nice to have a friendly voice on the other end of the phone. I don’t mind waiting 24 hours to get an answer; however, I’d like an acceptable answer within a reasonable time frame. If I’m paying a premium price, I’m expecting great service!
Quality in hosting is many times determined by service availability and speed. Did you know that you can get hosting that has 99.9% availability for less than $5 USD per month? That’s not the introductory offer.
What does 99.99% availability mean? Why is that important? Availability is defined by uptime. I.e. the time between failures. It is dependent upon
- Downtime and
- Recovery Time
Downtime is the amount of time that the system is unavailable due to either failures or scheduled maintenance. Recovery time is the average time it takes to recover from failures. This includes time for detection, isolation and resolution. This is important if you are expecting your website/blog/store to be open 24x7x365 days.
Well, if we consider a 24×7 environment like that of eBay, Amazon, etc then four nines would mean that in a year the total downtime + recovery time is approximately 52 minutes and 30 seconds. And three nines would mean downtime + recovery time of 8 hours and 45 minutes.
Simple math
3 nines –> (365×24) – .999(365×24) = 8760 -8751.24 = 8.76 hours = 8 hours and 45 minutes
2 nines -> (365×24) – .99(365×24) = 8760 -8672.4 = 87.6 hours = roughly 3.5 days!
1 nine – > (365×24) – .99(365×24) = 8760 -7884 = 876 hours = more than one month!!!
Just because you expect that a service will be available 24x7x365 doesn’t mean that it is available for that long. You need to look at your contract. Maybe it is only 24x5x365 (big difference)! That would allow for the system to be down for about 3 months out of a year without a raised eyebrow.
Will Google know who you are if your blog is offline for over a month? Do you have someone technical in your corner who is able to respond in case something technical happens or do you just have a helpdesk e-mail system that will be answered…someday? If your website/blog/store is your sole source of income either now or in the future, this would be considered a mission critical system.
Mission critical systems still fail but when they do there are knowledgeable people available to fix the system 24 hours a day everyday and give you an update of what is going on and when difficult decisions need to be made, they are knowledgeable enough to give you all the information for you to make a good business decision. Even if that means assisting you to move your website/blog/store from your backup (you DO have one, right?) to a different platform until theirs becomes available again.
For your autoresponder, think about what you are currently doing with your system today, especially if you are just starting out and don’t have that large of a list. It is possible to use a system to send 12,000 emails per month to a list of 2,000 subscribers completely free! If you are paying $20 – 75 per month to e-mail 10 people or even 50 people, it may not be the best use of your money this month.
Are you using your autoresponder as part of your membership program(s)? If your autoresponder went offline this afternoon, would that put a kink in your systems? I know it would kink my systems a bit! Once an issue is detected, it should take a very short period of time for you to switch to a different method of communication for your lists and programs. Not all systems that are readily at hand can send out large amounts of e-mail all at once.
The time to identify how to recover from such circumstances is before the issue arises so that you can respond calmly and orderly. Be aware of your contracts and use your resources wisely.