As the second continuation of our multi-week series on the basics, Web & Mobile App Hosting, let's focus on why support is important to your choice of web & mobile app hosting. In IT is an old adage, “have your emergency plans in place before you have emergencies”. Whatever level of web hosting plan you choose, it’s important to think about how the level of support in the web hosting plan you choose relates to emergencies.
From a physical location standpoint, now that we understand data center tiers, imagine the type of support that may or may not go along with a web hosting plan. A company with large financial resources may diversify their website’s source code with a large web host that operates tier 4 data centers all over the country (or world) in order to minimize any single point of failure. Furthermore a large company may employ teams of support staff at each location to ensure as little disruption as possible at the website level. For practical reasons, though, your web & mobile apps will probably not be diversified all over the world and employ teams of support staff. Frankly, that is overkill for most websites, even websites generating millions of dollars in revenue per year. Usually, web hosting is spread over 1 or 2 data centers at most; in fact, a smaller website may even elect to share one machine at one data center with hundreds of other websites.
Consider the level of hardware support in your web hosting plan. Power units fail. Discs corrupt. Most web hosting plans will account for these events in their level of service, and although the events are arguably extremely rare, when hardware failure occurs it can be devastating to a business website. Level of support in the event of hardware failure varies widely in web hosting plans. Some web hosting plans offer a guaranteed turn time to replace the failed hardware (for example 24 hours, or 1 hour). Others offer active/passive failover at the data center level (virtually no downtime), or nothing at all. Backups often occur at the hardware level, and it's important to understand the different backup and restore processes offered by your web & mobile app host.
Also, consider the level of software support in your web hosting plan. Often times software support is what surprises businesses most—specifically having less support than expected. Picture a scenario where you have invested time and money in a well architected web hosting plan that ensures redundancy, back-ups, etc. to ensure uptime and reliability, and then a severe bug appears in your software, such as a the shopping cart stops working! You call your webhost (or open a support ticket online) with an urgent request for help, and…your web hosts says software support is not in the scope of your support agreement. Don’t be too hard on yourself, even the large, powerful software companies—Google, Amazon, Facebook—have outages and bugs on their websites from time-to-time. Usually, software support is done by the same website developers that built your website for you, so do your homework on the level of service to expect in terms of software support to avoid unfortunate bugs remaining on your website for what seems like an eternity.
Lastly, consider that your host may offer premium service that acts like insurance (you may not often need help, but when you do it's an emergency). Often premium support is called "managed support". In the case of paying for extra support, the web & mobile app host offers both hardware and software expertise such as implementing important security updates and customizing programs at the web & mobile app host level. As always, understand the scope of managed support, because often your managed support will need to work closely with your development team in order to resolve more challenging bugs.
Even with the highest level of support, your hosting permissions may also affect your ability to quickly develop features on your web & mobile apps, which we cover in the next section.