Web Hosting in Honolulu, HI

The customer books from four thousand miles away

In most cities a website is a second opinion. Somebody has driven past the building, or a neighbour mentioned you, and the site confirms what they already half believe. Here a large share of the money arrives from somebody who has done none of that. They found you on a phone in another time zone, and the site is not the confirmation. It is the whole relationship.

That changes what the page has to carry. A distant customer cannot look through the window, so the site has to answer questions a walk-in would never ask.

• Photographs that are honest rather than flattering, because the visitor has no other way to check.
• Prices, or at least a plain range. People will not send a deposit into silence from four thousand miles away.
• Your actual location in words, not only a map pin, because they do not know the area.
• A page that opens on hotel wifi or a phone with two bars.

Trust is the product on a page like this. A padlock in the address bar is a small part of that, and a missing one is a large part of losing it. If your site takes an enquiry form or a deposit, the SSL certificate is not optional and it is not expensive.

If somebody has to phone you to find out roughly what you charge, most of them will not phone. They will book whoever answered that question on the page.

Photographs are your product, and photographs are what slow a site down

This is the useful part, and it has nothing to do with the city. Almost every slow website we are asked to look at is slow for the same reason, and it is never the hosting plan.

A camera produces a file several thousand pixels wide. Uploaded straight to a website, that image is shown at a fraction of its size but downloaded at full weight. Twenty of them on one page makes a homepage as heavy as a small application. On a fast desk connection you will not notice. On a phone on the other side of an ocean, you have lost the visitor before anything appears.

The fixes, in the order worth doing them

• Resize before uploading. Nothing needs to be wider than about two thousand pixels, and this alone often cuts a page by ninety per cent.
• Turn caching on, so the server hands over a finished page instead of rebuilding one for every visitor.
• Load images below the fold only when somebody scrolls to them.
• Remove third-party widgets that are not earning their place. Each is a separate connection to somebody else's server.
• Test on a phone on mobile data, not on the office network.

Do those and a modest shared hosting plan carries a heavy gallery site comfortably. Skip them and no plan at any price will make the page feel fast.

A bigger plan makes a heavy page slightly less slow. Making the page lighter makes it fast. They are not the same purchase.

Why web hosting in Honolulu, HI does not have to be local

It is the obvious objection, so here is the straight answer. Hosting is not a local service. Your website does not live in Honolulu today and it will not afterwards. It lives in a data centre, and which state that sits in makes no meaningful difference to somebody loading your page.

So the thing you are actually choosing is who answers when something is wrong. That varies enormously between providers and has nothing to do with the distance between two offices. We are in Buffalo, we answer Eastern time, and we have built websites since 1999.

The time gap is real and we will not pretend otherwise. Our morning is your middle of the night. In practice most hosting work is not urgent, and the parts that are, such as a migration, are scheduled anyway. If you need somebody who can walk into your office within the hour, we are the wrong choice, and so is every hosting company.

You are also further from your own server than most of your customers are, and that is fine. If you want to understand the real bill before you buy, what a website costs to run sets it out.

The genuinely local part of your marketing is your Google Business Profile, and it is free. Get that right before spending anything on hosting.