Once you make the decision to get online and have registered your domain name, the immediate problem you face is how to choose a suitable provider. The first part of the decision is very simple. You have to decide what level of performance you want for your site. If you are going to develop a commercial site it is important that you select a provider that is in close physical proximity to your main market. So, if you are selling to Australians, you will need to host in Australia.
If performance is not important to you (and your customers), you can select a web host provider almost anywhere in the world.
The reason for this is that within geographic markets, ISPs participate in National peer networking that delivers local content at low cost and high performance. ISPs will, in most cases, have high capacity pipes between them that allow users at any node to get near equivalent performance.
Once you set up your site on a server in another geographic zone, your traffic back to your home zone will be noticeably slower. If you do a lot of Email or transfer large files, slow performance can be frustrating.
Another factor to consider is how you will cope with system problems that will arise. In most cases it will be you who does the diagnosis of a fault. Support staff are often under heavy demand and so require concise fault information. They also receive a lot of calls for user-end errors and so may not immediately accept that a fault exists. If your provider is based in the US or Europe and your traffic is mostly Australian, you will find that the peak periods of traffic to your site are at times when the ISP will have minimum staff ready to fix faults and provide support. That is not to say that Australian ISPs will always be prompt. Some have very few support staff and may even close after hours. It is important that you consider how much downtime is acceptable to you, then choose a provider that can respond to faults within that time span.
By way of example, a well-known Australian provider had a recent outage on one server that took approximately 15 hours to rectify. Although they claim a 99.9% service availability overall, for those on that server, this single outage breached that statistic. We have experienced faults at significant US based provider sites that have extended as much as 4 days! The fact is that stability and support have a direct relationship to the price paid for hosting. Our experience is that the most stable provider, offering best support, is also the most expensive.
The type of site you want to operate will also have an influence. An Ecommerce site can be expensive to install with some providers. You need to check the cost of buying SSL certificates, having them installed and the provision of a permanent IP address. Costs for these vary largely between providers.
One of the most successful Australian businesses we know relies on email for over 90% of its web-based revenue. Web host providers offer Email services using different strategies. Some ISP’s place your SMTP and POP on the same server as your Web content. Others have high performance specialised Email servers. Each approach has different advantages and cost structures to operate.
Generally, we place high value content with local providers, with non-critical sites and bulk content hosted in the US.