Imagine this: You just launched a new product and find out that:
- Your website is unavailable because your web host/server is down
- You can’t seem to send or receive emails from your business email accounts and you have clients ringing your phone saying they can’t send you email
Here’s how you fix this:
Let’s backtrack a bit first.
Most web host providers provide the following for free with your web hosting fees:
- Free domain registration
- Email account hosting
Here’s why you should have SEPARATE hosts/vendors for each and why I don’t use these free features from my web host:
Your web hosting account (and subsequently your website) could have many things go wrong, such as:
- Your website is hacked and your web host is required to shut down your website (at least temporarily)
- If you’re on a shared hosting account (which many people are), maybe one of the other customers on your shared server crashes your web server bringing down all websites hosted on this server
- If you’re really unlucky, your web host provider goes bust and stops doing business all of a sudden
- These are just some possibilities
If any of the above were to happen, you would not only have your website down, but you would not have access to your emails nor your domain that you have registered through your web host provider.
In essence, you and your business (your livelihood) is at the mercy of your web hosting provider. You don’t want that. At least you want to minimise the amount of impact on your business as much as possible from the failure of one supplier.
This is why any new web business I start, I do the following:
- Register my domain with a separate domain registrar than my web host (I like to use Namecheap)
- Sign up for my web hosting (I like to use Hostgator as my primary web host)
- Once I can access my web hosting account, I change the email servers so my email accounts are hosted with a separate email host. (I like to use either Google Apps or Rackspace Email Hosting)
- Since I tend to have multiple websites, I host these sites between two different web hosts, so my alternate web host would be either (Midphase or Bluehost). I ensure that I’ve signed up for a package that can host multiple domains on my backup web hosts.
This way if my primary web host goes down for whatever reason, I can at least continue to access my business email accounts. Also, if I need to point my domain to a new web host (backup web host), I can easily do so through my independent domain registrar. So, this way I am not at the mercy of the one web hosting company.
This method may cost a little bit more, but not much more. At least it will save you from even more heavier losses if your entire business goes down due to a web host provider.
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