When choosing a business hosting provider it's important to determine your providers physical location. You want to know how close your provider is to an Internet exchange, what kind of data center are they using, and how they are hosting your business website.
Now I hear you saying, “It's more important to have enough disk space and bandwidth, that's what matters.” Unfortunately, that's what hosting providers want to you only consider. Let's face it, every provider offers enough disk space and bandwidth for any site hosted on a single server.
The problem is that MOST hosting providers oversubscribe the amount of bandwidth available or restrict it in their terms of service.
Think about it this way, you can have a huge distribution warehouse with plenty of space, but if it's located more than 200 miles down narrow back roads from the closest highway, in a bad location it's not worth much. No matter how nice the warehouse, a bad location is going to hose up your supply chain with delays and unmeasurable failures.
The same goes with the physical location of your hosting provider. If their servers are at the other end of narrow pipes on secondary networks you are dependent on too many variables that you can't control. You want as few hops as possible between your website and your customer.
By locating your hosting near an Internet exchange you can be sure to move traffic quickly off your providers network onto the public transit. Like driving out of your parking lot right onto a highway on ramp, down a wide open highway towards your destination.
Hosting physical location can influence search engine ranking and SEO, inclusion in search engines, and the sites ability to delivery to global visitors. It takes 2 seconds to get data around the world, but that will be forever if someone is waiting on your home page.
You also want to be hosted in a real data center. A real data center has redundant power, mass cooling system, and fire suppression. You'd be surprised but some hosting providers are located in general office complexes or some office back room.
How your server is managed matters too. There are as many providers who use home made control panels, old white box computers, and just don't have the infrastructure for growth. When a hosting providers systems or network fails, your website goes down. You want a stable environment that doesn't fail.
There is more to choosing a hosting facility than what is listed in a product description. For the best value when choosing business hosting always consider how close your provider is to an Internet exchange, what kind of data center are they using, and how they are hosting your business website.
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Justin Hitt helps business choose business hosting and manage their website to profits. Learn more about http://hosting.hittpublishingdirect.com/