Honolulu
Tourism, military and shipping.
Hosting in Honolulu
Hosting by state
Web Hosting in Hawaii
Most states sell to the people who live in them. Hawaii, to an unusual degree, sells to people who are not there yet, who are several time zones out, and who are deciding on a screen months before they arrive. That changes what a website is for, and what you should ask of web hosting in Hawaii.
We are not in Hawaii. AldoMedia works from one office in Buffalo, New York, and there is no Hawaii address, no local number and nobody on the ground there. Everything is set up, moved and supported remotely, which for hosting is how it normally works anyway.
An economy that sells to people who are not there yet
Three things carry a large share of the state's paid work: visitors, the military, and the movement of goods across an ocean. They look unrelated. From a website's point of view they have the same shape, because in all three cases the person reading your page is somewhere else.
A visitor books before the flight. A family posted to the islands arranges services before the household arrives. A shipper, a freight agent or a supplier is comparing you against alternatives from an office on another continent. None of them can walk past your door, look in, and decide.
That is worth sitting with, because it inverts the usual advice. On the mainland a small business site is often a confirmation: somebody has already heard of you and wants your hours. In this state the site is frequently the entire first impression, made by a stranger who has never set foot in the place and will not, until they have already paid.
What that does to the page
- The page has to answer questions a local would never ask, such as how far things are from each other and what season it is.
- It has to work for somebody on hotel wifi, airport wifi or a phone still on a foreign network.
- It has to be believable without a personal recommendation, because the reader has nobody nearby to ask.
- It has to take the booking, the deposit or the enquiry there and then, because the reader will not be awake when you are.
The reader is not comparing you against the business down the road. They are comparing you against doing nothing and sorting it out when they land.
Find out what your site does at 3am
Send us the address. We will tell you what the homepage weighs, how it loads for somebody on the mainland, and whether your enquiry form is actually delivering. If it is all fine, we will say so.
The hours your website works on its own
This is the part that makes hosting in this state genuinely different, and it is not a technical point at first. It is a scheduling one.
Hawaii keeps its own time and does not move the clocks, so the gap between the islands and the mainland changes twice a year without anybody in the state doing anything. The gap to the far side of the Pacific is larger still, and it crosses the date line, which means a good share of your enquiries are written on a day you have not had yet.
Put plainly: for most of any given day, your business is asleep and your website is on duty. Enquiries land overnight. Bookings land overnight. And so, if something is broken, does the outage. A site that goes down at nine in the morning on the mainland has fallen over in the small hours here, and unless somebody is watching, it may sit there for hours before anyone in the business knows.
What to do about it
- Assume nobody will notice a problem quickly. Build for that instead of hoping.
- Have the enquiry arrive somewhere reliable. A form that quietly stops sending is the classic silent failure, and in a market this asynchronous it can run for a week.
- Send an automatic acknowledgement. Somebody who wrote at their midnight needs to know the message arrived, or they book elsewhere before you wake.
- Keep restorable copies, not just a host feature you have never tested. There is more on website backups.
- Say your hours in a way that makes sense to a reader who is not in your time zone, and give a written route as well as a phone number.
None of that is exotic. It is ordinary practice applied honestly to a state where the customer and the business are rarely awake together.
Distance, and what it does and does not cost you
There is a real physical fact here that gets misused. The islands sit a long way from where most web infrastructure lives, and a request does have to cross an ocean. That is true. It is also, for a normal business website, a small number next to everything else on the page.
What actually makes a site feel slow to a reader in Hawaii is the same thing that makes it slow anywhere: weight. A homepage carrying a dozen unresized photographs of somewhere beautiful is the single most common cause we see, and this is a state where the temptation to load the page with photographs is stronger than average. Every one of those images crosses the ocean too.
The order to work in is boring and it works. Resize the photographs. Turn caching on so the server hands out a finished page rather than assembling one on every visit. Remove the widgets that are not earning their place. Only then wonder about where the server is.
If a page is heavy, distance makes it worse. If a page is light, distance is close to invisible. Fix the weight first, because it is free.
We will handle the move
Copy the site, test it on the new server, keep the mail records intact, then switch the domain. You keep taking bookings while it happens, and afterwards you have somebody to write to.
What an island economy needs from web hosting in Hawaii
Less than most businesses here are sold, with two honest exceptions.
The common case is a site of a few pages that changes occasionally, with an enquiry form and a booking link. That belongs on shared hosting and the entry tier usually covers it. Paying for a large plan does not make a page arrive faster across the Pacific, and nobody selling you one will volunteer that.
When spending more is justified
- You take deposits or payments on your own site rather than handing off to a platform.
- Your site carries a real booking calendar with live availability rather than a link to somebody else's.
- You publish a large photograph library and it is the reason people choose you.
- A day of downtime costs you bookings that cannot be recovered, because the visitor's dates do not move.
The last one is the genuinely island-specific reason. A missed enquiry from somebody local can often be picked up tomorrow. A missed enquiry from somebody with a fixed set of dates and a flight already booked is usually gone for good.
Volume of visitors on its own almost never justifies a bigger plan. Ask what a larger tier changes for your particular site, and if nobody can answer that in a sentence, stay where you are.
Why a Buffalo company, for a Hawaii business
Fair question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a slogan.
Hosting is not a local service. Your website almost certainly does not live in Hawaii today, and it will not afterwards either. It lives in a data centre somewhere else, as nearly every site in the state does. We are an independent authorised reseller, not the operator of a data centre, and we will not pretend otherwise.
So the thing you are actually choosing is who answers when something is wrong. That has nothing to do with distance and everything to do with whether a person replies. We are in Buffalo, we answer Eastern time, and we have been building and looking after websites since 1999.
Be clear about the trade. Our morning is your night before, and our afternoon is your morning. If you write at the end of your working day, you will usually have an answer waiting when you open the laptop. If you need somebody to walk into your office within the hour, we are the wrong choice and we will tell you so rather than take the money.
If you are moving away from a host that stopped answering, the order of operations that keeps your mail flowing through the change is on the website migration page.
Hosting by city in Hawaii
We work with businesses across the whole state, and the largest market has a page of its own on web hosting in Honolulu.
Every state is on our locations page, and every trade we cover is on hosting by industry.
Photograph: AlaskaDave, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
Common questions
Hawaii hosting questions
Does my website need to be hosted in Hawaii to be fast for visitors here?
No, and very few sites in the state are. The ocean crossing adds a delay measured in fractions of a second, which is swamped by page weight. A site that feels slow here is nearly always heavy rather than distant. Resize the photographs and turn caching on before you consider moving the server anywhere.
Most of my bookings come from people thousands of miles away. What should I change first?
Make the enquiry path work without you. Confirm automatically that the message arrived, state prices or ranges in writing rather than saying to call, and answer the practical questions a first-time visitor has and a local would not. Somebody writing at their midnight will not wait to be phoned back.
You are in New York. How does that work across the time difference with Hawaii?
It works, with an honest caveat. We answer Eastern time, which is the back half of your night and your early morning. In practice you write at the end of your day and read the reply at the start of the next one. That suits most hosting work, which is not urgent. It does not suit anyone who needs a person standing beside them.
My site went down overnight and nobody told me. How do I stop that happening again?
Accept that in this state overnight is most of the business day somewhere else, and stop relying on noticing. Put monitoring on the site so an alert reaches you rather than a customer, keep restorable backups you have actually tested, and make sure form submissions land somewhere you can check, not only in an inbox that may be part of the same failure.
Is a shared plan enough for a tourism business in Hawaii?
Usually yes. A few pages, a photograph gallery and a booking link is a light site, and an entry shared plan handles it. Spend more when you take payments yourself, run live availability on your own site, or lose bookings permanently if the site is down for a day, since a visitor's dates do not move.
Built for readers who are not there yet
Tell us what your site runs on and who it has to convince. We will tell you what to fix, what to leave alone, and whether the plan you are already paying for is the right one.
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Or call 716-771-2536. We are in Buffalo, New York, so we answer Eastern time.