Why You Should Never Use Your Development Company for Hosting

One of the irrefutable needs for any website is, of course, hosting. Your choice of hosting provider can play a big part in the success of your site; presumably, you want your site to enjoy maximum uptime and you rely on your hosting provider to ensure its reliability.

A fair number of website development companies will happily provide hosting services, yet you should steer clear of this insidious trap. While it is OK to consider an independent hosting provider that your development team recommends, it's highly inadvisable to actually pay for your hosting through the development company for three primary reasons.

Everything goes through the development company
If the developers are managing the hosting on your behalf, then you are at their mercy for support, maintenance and billing. Now, for many organizations this actually sounds ideal - after all, you hired the development company for exactly those reasons. But consider whether the developers are able to support your business at all hours. If your site is down at 10:30pm at night, is your development company going to answer the phone to resolve your issue? Not in most cases, yet all hosting companies provider 24/7 technical support.

Even putting aside an emergency scenario, what if you want to make a small change to your account information? Or just have a simple question? The development company may charge you maintenance fees for any work, no matter how small. Most hosting companies don't charge for routine assistance.

You may not know what you are getting
There are exactly two ways that development companies offer hosting: they actually own and maintain the servers where your site will run, or they outsource the hosting to a third party.

Hosting requires a significant amount of planning and resources. You need secure space, powerful hardware, ultra-high speed connections, cooling, redundant power, backup solutions, and constant maintenance of hardware and software. If your website is mission critical to your business, do you want it run out of a closet in a shared office building? And even if they co-locate your server in a proper data center, how easy is it for them to perform emergency maintenance? Do they have fail-over redundancy? Load balancing? Firewalls?

The other scenario is for them to outsource the hosting to a proper hosting company. This could be more ideal, but consider whether or not you can perform due diligence on the provider if you aren't told who they are. The company they use might not be much better than what they can provide in-house. Hosting is so critical to success that you should always know who is providing it for you.

One other thought about outsourced hosting: you are relying on the development company to pay their bill to the hosting company. Should they get behind on payments or have a check bounce, YOUR website is at risk of being shutoff, over something that you have no control over.

The divorce can be messy
There's a good chance that, someday, you will end your relationship with the development company. It's one matter to handle the transfer of all source code and development artifacts, but it's quite another to handle the hosting setup. Migrating your entire website from one server to another is a hassle at minimum and potentially disastrous at worse. If they are losing you as a customer, the development company is unlikely to go out of its way to help you through this process any more than they are contractually obligated to.

There are other considerations here as well. What kind of a contract did you sign? How can you get at your source code and database? Who maintains the credentials (and possibly created a back-door for themselves)? Where is your domain registered? If your hosting is coming only through your development company, these questions become incredibly important.

Tips for choosing a hosting company
Here are some things to keep in mind as you establish hosting for your website:

• Never use pass-through hosting via your development company. Ensure that your hosting account is in your name, at a company of your choosing.
• It is fine to consider a company that is recommended, but always perform due diligence before agreeing to use them.
• Research at least 5 different hosting companies, and be aware of apples-to-apples comparison of hosting plans. There are so many features (maintenance, backups, extra disk space, etc.) that it is easy to get confused by the options.
• Ensure that the plan or server supports the necessary technologies for your website (i.e. PHP, ASP/.NET, SQL, etc.)
• Call the hosting company's technical support number before you sign-up. One reason that I love my hosting company CrystalTech is that a qualified, English-speaking human answers the phone in less than 60 seconds. Ask them a question to which you already know the answer and test how well they respond.
• As with any service provider, check the fine print about what is included and what you will pay extra for.

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