Review: Netfirms

There are a lot of web hosting companies out there. Many of them are good, have been in business for a long time, and are reputable – but they will not help an ecommerce business that is growing.

There is more to web management than storage and bandwidth. I’ve hosted with ‘good’ webhosting companies. However, if you create a good ‘customer friendly’ content management system, with all the features needed to keep users, then you run into problems.

The servers can only handle so many queries. A single web page can have 20 – 30 database queries, especially if there is advertising on the page. This increase the ‘time’ needed for the server to handle the page.

Some of the common web hosting sites will start limiting the site as soon as more than a dozen people start hitting the site. One night they closed my website down when 5 people entered the chat room.

Netfirms has ‘shared servers.’ If one site cannot handle the weight of the queries on a server, it merely borrows more from the next server. This means that I can now have 50 people in a server without problems.

This doesn’t mean I can have my sites on the $4.90 a month service. I use the $12.99 business service, but I can host multiple websites with individual domains, without worrying.

The important thing is that I can ‘upgrade’ to managed servers at a later date, if needed, and still keep the shared servers.