Small Business Web Hosting

Rather than facing the hassle of maintaining their own server, many businesses choose to use a web hosting for their internet presence.

But what costs are involved and how do you go about choosing the right kind of web hosting service? Angus Kidman reports.

For some businesses a website is just a useful addition to their operations, but for travel directory provider, TotalTravel, it’s the very heart and soul of the business. "TotalTravel is probably the largest site of its kind in Australia, offering around 300,000 pages of destination information," says global marketing manager, Paul Fisher. The company, based in Byron Bay, New South Wales, aims to provide a comprehensive directory of travel options in Australia, making its money by charging individual providers to advertise on its site and, for around 1,000 companies, helping them set up their own internet presence.

"The site gets up to 65,000 people on a busy day. An average month is around 1.5 million visitors. When you have that volume of content and a significant volume of suppliers, it’s a lot of moving parts," Fisher says. "Everyone talks about the internet being a level

playing field, but that’s not always the case. It’s hard to get some presence unless you’ve got some serious marketing dollars." TotalTravel has always used an external provider. "There are still a lot of companies that host for themselves, but we don’t think it’s

our core business. We wanted somebody who lived and breathed hosting." However, they originally chose one based solely on getting the cheapest overall price, and ended up with a hosting company based in Singapore, which proved increasingly less suitable as TotalTravel expanded.

"As the business grows, and we’ve grown very rapidly, particularly over the last two years, the stakes get higher—10,000 travel suppliers are now reliant on our business. Now we’ve got such a massive amount of traffic, we can’t afford to put a foot wrong in the area of hosting infrastructure." In February 2006, the company decided to start

looking for a new provider. They eventually settled on Macquarie Telecom, and in September signed a three-year contract with the company, which runs a dedicated hosting centre in Sydney. While the selection process was time-consuming, the actual transition was fairly fast, and the site moved to the new provider in October.

Reliability was the main driver in making the switch. "We can’t afford to have two minutes of downtime," says chief operating officer, Esther Parsons, who says it’s important to weigh up the cost of downtime to your business. "It can put a dark cloud on a business if the site’s down." Parsons says Macquarie’s record of no downtime for any of

its hosted sites played a major role in the decision, though she admitted the increased costs associated with this required careful consideration. "It’s been a massive increase in cost and the difference between the two is enough to give you a cardiac arrest. We’ve had to pay a lot more for it."