Q: Why Should Marketers Pay Attention to Web Hosting?
A: Risk Reduction.
Most marketers don’t pay much attention to web hosting. They often think of web hosting as a commodity that the IT folks handle. But hosting is sometimes bundled into a an online development project and IT folks aren’t involved at all, or very minimally. And your web development or design partner might not have any expertise in this area, or not understand how to maintain the web hosting service.
Also, most people are worried about hacking and DDOS attacks, because those issues get all the media attention, but it is much more likely that a software glitch or bug will hit your site.
Here are a few typical problems that we run into:
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Operating system obsolescence or end of life.
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Software or service upgrades that make your site buggy or non-functional.
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Server hardware malfunctions.
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Small security holes that are not plugged by inexperienced developers.
Finally, who first discovers a wounded website first? Your online visitors (also known as “your market”). Who then contact sales, an executive or your webmaster (or the marketing team finds you’re being bombed all over social media). Who contacts IT. Who hasn’t been involved and doesn’t really know how to help!
Why “Risk Reduction” Rather than “Risk Elimination?”
Risk elimination is impossible. Hackers get more sophisticated. People make mistakes. Bad things happen. The key is to structure your hosting in a way that you reduce the possibility of bad things happening.
The good news is that you can inexpensively and fairly quickly set up services and systems that will reduce risk to your websites.
In our next post, we’ll outline some of these solutions. They will include:
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Development, staging and production (live) web environments.
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Load balancing, failover and backups.
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Access and permission schemes.
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Upgrade and update processes.
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Basic security testing and virus scanning.
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Cloud versus physical (dedicated or shared) hosting (or a combination).
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A brief focus on highly regulated industries, like pharmaceuticals.
Please let us know if you have any thoughts or questions about this critical issue!