The main bullet points:
– How to find a good hosting provider. What are nice to haves and what should be requirements in your search.
– Your website was down for 4 minutes from 2:00am to 2:04am and you’re irate. Why you shouldn’t be…
– Point out the number of things that are involved with being a web host. The number of things that can go wrong and cause an outage.
– DNS, Updates, OS’s becoming end of life, Customers not giving their website the attention it requires
– Things you can do to help yourself. Don’t rely on your host. Make sure you’re fully utilizing all that they’re providing you. Be proactive and take matters into your own hands. Use your host as a last resort.
– Backups, Monitoring, etc.
– This leads to discussing cPanel, and Plesk features. The 2 largest control panels for PHP based websites.
– End with something along these lines: If you take the necessary time to maintain your website and give it the care it requires you won’t need to rely on your host, and your experience will be 10x better than if you just pay someone to build your website, and expect it to be up and running for the next X years.
Summary: I’ve used several different hosting companies for my own personal websites. And now I’ve worked for one for the past year. It has opened my eyes tremendously and I want to share this with others. If I can rub off on one or two people I would be happy. Hosts get a bad rap when 9 times out of 10 whatever gave them that bad rap likely wasn’t their fault!
Intended Audience: Any person looking to get their website hosted