Two Web Hosts Are Better Than One

By Michael Collins

You probably think its crazy to use two different web hosting providers. I used to think so too. IAfter all, most shared hosting plans give you tons of disk space and bandwidth and they allow you to host as many domains as you could ever need. Why should you pay twice the price if one gives you all you'll ever need?

That's what I used to think. Then I suffered a painful lesson that taught me never to put all of my eggs in one basket again.

When I first started building web sites I didn't have a lot of money to spare so I was very careful with my expenses. I chose an inexpensive shared hosting plan with a provider that had a good reputation. For a long time things went smoothly and I never had any problems at all.

But then it happened. My web host's server crashed and all of my sites were down. And while they were down my revenue grinded to a halt. It took several calls to their customer support line to find out what was going on and all they could tell me was that the problem was not on my end. There were lots of sites down and they were working hard to get them back up as soon as possible.

It ended up taking them a week to get things back to normal. All of my sites were down that entire week. If anyone tried to visit them they got a "Page Not Found" error and probably thought the site was gone for good. Any advertising links that were providing me traffic were sending them to a lousy error page and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn't make a dime all week long.

But oh boy did I learn my lesson! As soon as my sites came back up and I had verified that all was back to normal I opened another hosting account with a different provider and moved half of my sites to their server. I'm no longer putting all of my eggs in one basket. If one of them crashes all I have to do is redirect my sites to the other host's server and I'll be back in business in no time.

Sure it costs me a little more each month, but hosting is so cheap these days that its foolish not to have a backup plan with a secondary host.

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