Web Hosting in California

One state, several unrelated economies

It is tempting to treat the state as a single market. It is not. The work that pays the bills in one part of it barely exists in another, and the websites reflect that.

Along the coast and the bay, software, biotechnology and design firms compete for clients who are technically literate and impatient. Their sites are read on fast connections by people who will judge you in four seconds. Inland, in the long agricultural valley, the money is in growing, processing, hauling and repairing, and the website is often read on a phone with poor signal by somebody standing in a yard.

Then there is the freight economy around the ports, the government and services work in the capital, the defence and health research in the south, and the enormous property and construction trade that follows all of it. These are different customers with different habits, and a page written for one of them reads as noise to another.

Before you write a word for your site, decide which of those economies you actually sell into. Most small businesses here sell into exactly one.

What specificity asks of web hosting in California

A strategy of many narrow pages produces a site with a lot of pages that each get modest traffic. That shape has practical consequences, and they are not the ones hosting companies usually sell against.

You do not need more capacity. Forty small pages weigh less than one homepage carrying unresized photography, and shared hosting handles that comfortably. What you need is the ability to add a page without asking anyone, without a ticket and without a fee, because the whole approach depends on being able to write a page the week you notice you need one.

You also need every one of those addresses to survive. A site like this accumulates value slowly across dozens of pages, and the single most damaging thing you can do to it is a redesign that changes every address without redirecting the old ones. That is a migration problem, and it is covered on the website migration page.

• Keep addresses readable and permanent. If you would be embarrassed to read it aloud on the phone, change it now rather than later.
• Make sure you can edit text yourself. A page you have to pay someone to change is a page that goes stale.
• Keep backups you have actually restored from once, not just paid for.
• Watch what the whole thing costs to run before you add another subscription to it. The arithmetic is on what a website costs to run.

The competitive pressure in this state pushes people towards expensive tools. Nearly always the winning move is more pages, not a bigger plan.

The mistakes this state produces

Certain errors are far more common here than elsewhere, and they all come from the same pressure.

Chasing a term you cannot win

Months of effort aimed at a phrase held by a company a hundred times your size. The traffic never arrives, and the pages that would have worked never got written.

Buying performance you do not need

A large plan bought to compete with a competitor's fast site, when their site is fast because it is light. Resize the photographs, turn caching on, remove the widgets that nobody uses, and then look at the plan.

Renting your presence

A site built inside a platform you do not control, then discovered too late to be unmovable. The comparison is set out on the hosting versus website builder page. Own the domain, own the content, and keep both somewhere you can take with you.

Letting the domain lapse

Competition here is fierce enough that an expired domain in a desirable trade does not sit unclaimed for long. Set the renewal to automatic and check that the contact address on it is one you still read.