Hosting can run anywhere between $0.01 (yes, you read that right) and $20.00 per month per website.\u00a0 An autoresponder<\/a> can cost anywhere between free (yes, you read that right) and $75.00 per month or more depending on your list size.\u00a0 So if you’re beginning, do you think positively and buy the largest package available believing that you will grow exponentially<\/a> this month or do you sign up for what you need today and upgrade as you need it?<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Are there other factors to consider besides price in choosing your services?\u00a0 Some of the factors that might be worth considering would be ease of use, flexibility, support, availability<\/a>, scalability and speed.\u00a0 Does the tool do what you need it to?\u00a0 If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter how much it costs – it’s not worth your time to mess with it!<\/p>\n For a beginner, support is essential!\u00a0 Do you enter a ticket into a help desk<\/a> system to be answered …. someday (which is not a day of the week) or does a human with a pulse answer your request?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I don’t mind waiting 24 hours to get an answer; however, I’d like an acceptable answer within a reasonable time frame<\/a>.\u00a0 If I’m paying a premium price, I’m expecting great service!<\/p>\n Quality in hosting is many times determined by service availability and speed.\u00a0 Did you know that you can get hosting that has 99.9% availability for less than $5 USD per month?\u00a0 That’s not the introductory offer.<\/p>\n What does 99.99% availability mean?\u00a0 Why is that important?\u00a0 Availability is defined by uptime. I.e. the time between failures. It is dependent upon<\/p>\n Downtime is the amount of time that the system is unavailable due to either failures or scheduled maintenance.\u00a0 Recovery time is the average time it takes to recover from failures. This includes time for detection, isolation and resolution.\u00a0 This is important if you are expecting your website\/blog\/store to be open 24x7x365 days.<\/p>\n Well, if we consider a 24\u00d77 environment like that of eBay<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, etc then four nines would mean that\u00a0 in a year the total downtime + recovery time is approximately 52 minutes and 30 seconds. And three nines<\/a> would mean downtime + recovery time of 8 hours and 45 minutes.<\/p>\n Simple math <\/strong><\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n 3 nines<\/strong> \u2013> (365\u00d724) \u2013 .999(365\u00d724) = 8760 -8751.24 = 8.76 hours = 8 hours and 45 minutes<\/p>\n 2 nines<\/strong> -> (365\u00d724) \u2013 .99(365\u00d724) = 8760 -8672.4 = 87.6 hours = roughly 3.5 days!<\/p>\n 1 nine<\/strong> – > (365\u00d724) \u2013 .99(365\u00d724) = 8760 -7884 = 876\u00a0 hours = more than one month!!!<\/p>\n Just because you expect that a service will be available 24x7x365 doesn’t mean that it is available for that long.\u00a0 You need to look at your contract.\u00a0 Maybe it is only 24x5x365 (big difference)!\u00a0 That would allow for the system to be down for about 3 months out of a year without a raised eyebrow.<\/p>\n
\n <\/a> Are you getting good value for the money you are spending to keep your blog up and running?\u00a0 Are you overspending on tools for the position your list is in this month?<\/p>\n\n