Performance Hosting Japan - Why your website deserves proper hosting

Performance Hosting Japan
 
At Rain we regularly suggest or manage the hosting of websites on behalf of our clients, and I've been wanting to write a simple explanation of what we recommend for some time. Quite often we are surprised that a client will allocate a significant budget to design and development, but when it comes to the hosting of their new, highly tuned beast of a site the plan for hosting it is on some cheap service plan disproportionate to the site they have commissioned. Now of course clients aren't expected to know the ins and outs of web hosting, but generally if you have a high powered, CMS driven website or system you're going to want something proportional to do it justice. The main problem is that cheap hosting is akin to building a 5 star hotel with beautiful facilities, but down a long, twisty narrow dirt track in the middle of nowhere. Then once visitors make it to the lobby the only way to get to each of your 45 floors is by a rickety wooden ladder. So customers flock to your new hotel in their cars, get jammed up both ways on the dirt track and when they enter the lobby (providing they didn't quit and go elsewhere), they then are required to climb up a ladder (along with everyone else). This is the experience of poor hosting when you have a high powered site (or even a remotely modern site to be honest). The site maybe fantastic but getting to it and navigating around it is painful on poor hosting... so why do this to your visitors? Well we shouldn't right? It's a huge waste of all that budget spent on design and build if no one can appreciate it.

So when we see a rich and engaging site, we recommend the investment in a good hosting plan, else each visit you could argue is taking value away from the original money you paid for the thing being built.

If you are building a company level website, allocate budget for a solid web hosting service, preferably not shared, and get away from anything sold on the basis of it being cheap! That means it will be slow, break regularly and the support people are unlikely to be overly prompt in getting back to you.

I'm not going to recommend here any hosting companies or slate others. Simply state that it is worth every extra yen to get decent higher level hosting. And even if you figure out the cost of decent hosting over 5 years, it will be tiny against the allocation for design and system build.

Another facet of hosting performance in this article is location (in this case Japan). You want to host your website where you audience are. A lot of the 'deals' available are in the US, and in some cases they can be very good. However you need to offset the performance you gain (for your budget --- avoid basing it on being cheap) from the distance to your audience. We've seen websites gain an entire second in speed by being local, and that is for each element loaded on the page. Subsequently a weaker host in Japan will be much quicker than an overseas host. So if your expected visitors coming from Japan, seriously consider the gains of choosing a host whose services are 100% definitely in Japan.

Now the big boys will use a CDN to deliver their site from different locations depending on the visitor but for most projects companies don't go that far --- if they were considering CDNs they don't need our advice. So hosting needs to be considered in the overall project plan for a new website. If you are building something new, big and beautiful you want a 5 lane highway leading straight to it with high-speed elevators to every floor in your building. Nothing ever breaks because you've got backup electricity generators running and the maintenance guy lives next door. That way everyone who visits gets to see and experience everything you had made in its full glory, as opposed to something beautiful never really living up to its potential.