Good Morning-
I have a site to go online that has a lot of jpegs and giffs, and hopefully will receive a fair bit of traffic..How do i ask my prospective host if they can handle it?....
The problem is that I have found Someone local to me who has a couple of small sites he is hosting from home, sounds a bit wack I know but apparently he has three pc's in different loocations all updating one n other simulataniously...I assume this is good practice....So he sounds kinda ok so far.
but how to pose the question to find out if he has enough bandwith to handle the job??/or other questions to ask him?

cheers tim.

Just think who would you rather your website be handled by a single person in a home with a couple of computers serving website via a single internet connection (probably dsl) or a multi million dollar data centre with man Gig bandwidth providers.

Another thing to consider is if this single person is out of the house shopping/socialising etc... and there is a problem, how long would your site be down?

Hi Drat39,

If you're confident that you will receive a fair amount of traffic, you may want to go with a reputable international host. As others have mentioned, one person will not be able to offer the support or reliability that you need. However, if you are intent on going with this local provider, make sure that he is tech-savvy. The last thing you want is for your host to be dumbfounded when the PC's crash or have some sort of fatal error.

Conker

Hi Drat39,

Have you received any price quotes from him yet, even if they are vague ones? If not, I suggest you try and get hold of some as soon as you can, even if the deal for a package does not perfectly match with your exact requirements. The reason, and imo, is that its not even comparable to hosts online whos servers are run by professional data centres, unless there is a significant difference.

I would highly recommend staying away from anyone that runs a webhosting service out of his home.

Where is his redundancy? What happens if the power goes out? what happens if there is a fire? Are his servers in a secure location? Who has access to his servers? If his kids are playing with power cords what happens? What happens when his DSL provider shuts him down for illegally running servers on a home connection (assuming he doesnt have a business connection)? There is alot of reason to go with a provider that has servers homed at datacenters where any of the above and many other situations would easily be covered. If any of those situations occured with him your site would be unavailable. And with current pricing in the hosting industry there is no reason at all to not be with a top notch provider.