LexiConn Internet Services (www.lexiconn.com <-affiliate link) is an Authorized ShopSite Hosting Partner. They are well known and respected in the ShopSite community. LexiConn and atStuff LLC (my company) have a mutual affiliate relationship. My friend Rob Mangiafico, CTO of LexiConn, has great knowledge of all-things hosting and ShopSite and I asked him to answer this month’s Five Questions.
Mike: Hi Rob, Happy New Year. Please tell us a little about yourself and LexiConn.
Rob: I am the co-owner and CTO of LexiConn Internet Services, Inc. We started the company back in 1996 as one of only a handful of hosts on the web at that time. Today there are many thousands of hosting companies, and although things have changed drastically, the need for customer service, easy to use hosting, and reliable service are still front and center.
At LexiConn we all wear many hats, but my main tasks are overall network management, server management, and the testing and implementation of new services and technologies. In between I try to fit in a little marketing, some blogging, and juggle the day to day fires that pop up.
Mike: Reliable hosting is mission critical for online merchants and online publishers. What questions should people ask a hosting provider?
Rob: There are a few key questions people should ask of any potential host:
- What are your backup practices? Can you restore data for my account if I need it?
- What is your disaster recovery plan?
- How many sites do you put on one server? What is the average load on a server? How are spikes in traffic handled?
- What is your uptime over the past few years? What happens if there is an outage?
- How do you keep your customers informed if your main website is down?
Mike: PCI compliance isn’t 100% mandatory yet but eventually even small ecommerce sites will have to be compliant. What advice can you give merchants that are working to become compliant?
Rob: PCI is a confusing beast to say the least. However, a merchant can make their life easier by not storing or ever seeing the credit card numbers and data. If the credit card data is only passed along to a gateway like Authorize.net, then the scope of PCI is limited to the ecommerce software they are using, and the website itself. Assuming the ecommerce software is PCI compliant, the merchant passes their PCI scans, and completes the shortened PCI questionnaire, it is easy to achieve and maintain PCI compliance.
Make sure your ecommerce software is certified PCI compliant, and choose a host that understands PCI and can insure your site is PCI compliant. These two things alone will help simplify achieving compliance.
One thing many merchants fail to realize is if you download credit card numbers to your local network / PC, then PCI rules apply to your local network as well. This means card data must be double encrypted, proper firewalls maintained, etc… That is why it’s often best to not handle the credit cards in-house. Using a payment gateway to automate card charges removes this extra layer of complexity from the PCI process.
Mike: Online success requires technical and marketing skills. Many of those skills, like search engine optimization (SEO), are a combination of tech and marketing. How do you help your clients increase their success?
Rob: It’s true that success online requires a skillful blend of tech and marketing / business know-how. We address the technical side of hosting by first providing a stable and reliable environment for all clients. We offer the latest technologies, and strive to make the administration of a website as simple as possible. For example, our control panel is designed to offer only those features webmasters will need to manage their sites. It is not littered with extra functions that can cause confusion.
To address the marketing side of the coin, we try to provide our clients with information that can help with selling items online, improving their website, enhancing their search engine ranking, etc… We do this through a variety of channels such as our monthly newsletter, our news forum, our blog, and through Twitter and Facebook. We keep the noise to a minimum, while focusing on what we feel is important and can help our clients succeed.
Mike: Successful sites eventually need more of everything. Storage, bandwidth, load-balancing, etc. Have any of your clients experienced instant exposure? How did you help them prepare for the increased load? What indicators can a hosting client monitor so they know when it’s time to bulk up?
Rob: Yes, we’ve had a number of clients through the years achieve this “instant” success. We have seen clients progress from our smallest plan, to an ecommerce website, to their own managed dedicated server, to multiple servers to keep up with their ever increasing online store. We’ve also had clients that have been featured on Oprah, the Food Network, and other high profile shows. In those cases, we worked with each client to help them prepare for the large amount of traffic their sites would receive.
We actually have a client getting ready for Oprah soon, and they have a number of servers in place to handle the spike in traffic (and hopefully sales). We helped them setup the server to server replication, and have optimized each server to handle a large number of simultaneous visitors.
The biggest thing clients can monitor with respect to their website growth is how fast their web pages load. A recent Forrester study found that online shoppers are only willing to wait TWO seconds for a web page to load before considering going to another website. If you find your site is sluggish (due to the hosting account itself), it may be time to find a new host, or migrate to a dedicated server.
Mike: What “Best Practices” do you suggest for business web sites?
Rob: First and foremost, choose a web host that understands your business, and caters to businesses. Do not try to cut corners and choose the cheapest host, as your host can make or break your website. A web host that has solid reliability and customer service that is truly knowledgeable and fast to respond is worth the extra expense. If your website is down, or support cannot fix your issues, you are losing money in terms of lost sales or opportunities.
Always test your website on a weekly basis. If you have an ecommerce website, place a test order each week to verify the process works smoothly, there are no security errors, etc… Test your site in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. I can’t count the number of times we see client websites that are essentially non-functional in Firefox or Internet Explorer.
Monitor how your company is being discussed online on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Set up a Google alert for your company name so you’re notified when your company is mentioned online. Don’t forget to keep up with your competitors as well, so you can see changes in your industry and take the appropriate actions.
And last, invest the time and money in your website to have it look professional, be free of typos and mistakes, and has unique engaging content that is both optimized for the search engines and is effective in communicating your message to potential clients.
Mike: Thanks Rob!
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