What to Ask When Choosing a Website Provider

Choosing a business to develop your website should not be taken lightly. At Global Reach, we often meet with prospective clients who have tried previously working with a one-man-band style operation: a single individual who claims to be a website developer/designer, an e-commerce aficionado, and an internet hosting company all rolled into one.

While the initial price tag at these companies may seem attractive, the hidden costs are soon discovered. Here are 7 Questions You Should Ask when choosing a website provider.

1. Where is your server located? If their answer involves ‘the basement’ or a country on the other side of the world, your site could be in trouble. At Global Reach, all of our servers are replicated and located in safe and secure data centers within our office buildings (not in the basement!) This enables our employees to work on them directly instead of waiting on a third party company to do the work for us.
    
2. What is your back-up plan? By ‘back-up’ we don’t mean moving the servers back three feet every day. Global Reach preforms daily back-ups of our clients’ websites as a standard practice with modern hardware. In addition, all of the servers are replicated between two data centers. This means, in the event of a castastrophic disaster, we can easily switch between the two centers in a matter of minutes.
    
3. What is your availability going forward? Be wary if the answer involves the phrase, ‘Once I get a real job….’ Global Reach has a dedicated staff of nearly 40 full time employees. Founded in 1995, our long-standing reputation is proof that we will be able to service your present and future website development and hosting needs.
    
4. Do you share your office with other companies? Who has direct access on the server that will host my website? All access to our data centers is controlled and protected by access cards. Only a few authorized Global Reach employees have access to them and all access is logged. As a client, you can rest easy knowing that only Global Reach employees are authorized to work on the hardware where your website is stored.
    
5. Who are your past clients? Cousins, aunts, and uncles should generally not be included in this list. Global Reach has over 1,000 loyal clients and has developed more than 1400 web applications that showcase our capabilities.
    
6. Are you PCI compliant? This is a trick question. The response should be, "I am PCI compliant". PCI (Payment Card Industry) is a set of regulations instated to protect sensitive information such as credit card numbers. Global Reach adheres to the PCI standards and goes through rigorous scans of our network on a monthly basis.
    
7. How many employees does your company have…..not including your dog? With over 40 employees and growing, Global Reach has a large and exceptional staff to meet your business’s needs.