Many webmasters used to install a chat room software for their customers, company websites. In today’s world, there are much better solutions than actually downloading, configuring, installing, maintaining a chat. Now there are hosted chat room services.
A chat room installation could create a huge headache for webmasters and chat room owners to a degree that it potentially harm their businesses. We will discuss in here why you should use a hosted chat room vs installing a chat software !!!
Email you do not want to get from your Hosting company during a live event.
This is an email from one of our customer that used to have a chat software.
He got this disturbing email and was forced to stop a live chat event as a result of an installed chat room:
I installed a chat room script and used it for a 2 hour broadcast. There were 6 people on the chat and maybe 20 messages in total were exchanged.
Within a short period, my host, took my entire site down because they say the Chat function was creating 20,000 queries per minute and that it was using all the system resources of the server. Also, it was not obvious to me how to uninstall the script and I had to get my developer to fix it.
Can you believe it? it can ruin your business and reputation. It is outrageous !!!
Ok, let’s dig into it and understand why this happened.
Reason 1 – The fact is that Hosting companies prevent customers from installing a Chat Room on their servers
To understand why hosting companies do not like chat rooms, we need to understand first what hosting companies does. Web sites are installed on a server, so hosting companies want to install as many sites on one server. Sometimes, a small server machine with 1 CPU server may host over 2000 websites.
Sounds strange? well, this is what happen normally in a shared hosting machine!
Now, a chat room is a heavy CPU and memory consumer and as such consume enormous part of the server resources. The result might slow down the entire server. This means that 2000 websites are going down because of one chat room.
In oppose to a chat software script, A Hosted chat price is simple, clear and never change due to unexpected hidden costs.
Reason 2 – Overall chat software scripts tend to be expensive
Yes, it sure is!
The cost of a chat room script should be calculated by the peripheral costs.
In addition to the cost of the script itself, one should know he will need to host it on a server. If more than 25 chatters are needed, than a dedicated server is preferred. For high load chat rooms, you will need a stronger server (like 4 CPU’s and 16 GB memory) or several parallel servers if the chat software architecture allows it.
Of course, take into consideration that someone will need to install the chat software, maintain it and deal with different aspects of the configuration, settings and dealing with malfunctions. Time is a major factor as well. You spend
Time is a major factor as well. You spend a lot of time to read and install the software. Now normally it takes even more time to do it right.
In oppose to chat script, A Hosted chat service is normally very…VERY… simple to add to your website, just put a piece of code in your HTML and you are all done.
Reason 3 – Technical – why hosted chat room?
When you install a chat room on your website, chatter will access the chat room and by doing that they will share resources that are used to operate your website, database..etc.
This means that if the chat is heavily loaded (it does not take a lot to load a chat software as it uses your machine resources) your website and database will be extra slow.
A chat room software script installed on your website is not as robust as professionals hosted chat room service. There are no load balancers and there is no backup for your website and for the conversation transcript.
In oppose to chat software script, A Hosted chat room is not sharing your website resources (e.g CPU, memory, bandwidth) and is totally separated from the website you run.
Hosted chat room is pretty awesome when you want to change your chat look and feel, style it up with your own flavor and embed in two minutes. Try it now.
