Wednesday 3 April 2013

Thinking of Switching Hosting or Broadband Provider?

Plan Ahead When Considering
Changing Hosting Provider
A natural reaction when organisations want to reduce costs is to look at changing their service providers. We wrote about this in more detail in Changing Premises and Suppliers.
We wanted to highlight some specific issues with changing broadband provider and website hosting companies. As these are both competitive markets, we’re seeing more and more organisations wanting to do it. It’s not always cost that drives organisations to switch, sometimes it's additional facilities or services. But regardless of the reason, the pitfalls to be aware of are the same and include the points given below.

Loss of internet access. If you change broadband provider, you’ll not be able to use the internet for several days, so no emails, websites or web-enabled applications unless you set up a separate means of access such as Wi-Fi.

If you use any cloud-based applications, you’ll also lose them. So if you have Google Documents, Googlemail, remote off-site back-ups or specific cloud-based software, you’ll lose access during the handover period.

Loss of website and emails. If you’re changing the organisation who hosts your website or provide your email adresses, you’ll also lose your emails and company website during the handover period. We don’t mean you won’t be able to access websites in general – you can do that if you have an alternative arrangement such as Wi-Fi. We mean that your customers can’t access your website, which could be disastrous for sales and service.

It also means that you won’t get your emails. It doesn’t mean they will be held in a server somewhere and you can access them when the system comes back on, it means they are lost forever with no way to get them back. You’ll never get them.

Changing hosting company or broadband provider is a serious proposition. We’re not saying don’t do it, there might be very good reasons why you want or need to. But you do need to plan it carefully in advance. In our blog posting next month - Reducing the Pain of Switching Broadband or Hosting Provider, we’ll highlight some of the techniques you can consider to mitigate the effects experienced the handover period.