Nonprofits and stability in webhosting
As a web developer I get a lot of inquires from business owners who are trying to find a stable, reliable, and affordable webhost. I have spent the last 12 years dealing with different hosting companies on a daily basis and I’m in a position to offer sound advice regarding at least my various experiences with some of the companies offerings and services. I have seen some hosts that get better over time and some that get worse. One of the most frustrating things are companies that seem to offer a lot of storage space and bandwidth for a low price but put severe limits on CPU usage which can in some cases cause severe and sometimes completely disabling downtime to an ordinary website. Clients of mine want stable webhosts, at the same time they want to know that they’re getting a competitive price.
Delving more into the issue of stability, further stability comes from a webhost that does not overload it’s servers. An overloaded server simply does not perform well. It may have programs that die due to the server being overloaded. At first glance this might not seem critical but it is very critical. For example, suppose that program that dies is the MySQL server. I bring this up because it has been a common problem I have seen over the years. When MySQL dies, any database driven website will die with it. This has been critical for some of my e-commerce customers who simply cannot operate without a database. Consider alternatively if the web server (e.g. Apache) dies. Then the website doesn’t function at all, it’s as if the DNS is sending the potential customer directly into a roadblock the cause of which is an overloaded server. The only solution is for the host to restart the server. This can all be avoided by selecting a quality host that does not overload it’s servers and has the measures in place to correct a problem should it occur.
A few months ago, I had a friend of mine who manages a 501(c)(3) nonprofit contact me regarding hosting for her website. Initially she wanted me to host the site for her, when I told her that is not something I do I began to explore hosting options for her. One main requirement in her situation was for the hosting company to be as affordable as possible as her nonprofit funds are limited. I explained to her the problem of sometimes ridiculous CPU usage limits of low cost companies and overloaded server problems as I explained above. I also wanted to find her a cPanel-based hosting platform as I’ve found that clients prefer this system over other web-based control panels. After looking into it, I found a Nevada based company McKremie, LLC which offers their business hosting plan free to any US-based registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit or to public schools including all the features of their paid plan.
I directed her to the webhosting for nonprofits form and she was up and running with her website shortly thereafter. She has been happy with her hosting, I have done some work on the site and have also been delighted to deal with a quality webhost. Uptime has been fantastic as well as server availability and stability with quick access times of the pages on her website.