Today choosing a hosting company is not an easy task. Varied number of web-hosts and resellers with their varied pricing schemes makes the task discouraging.
Every customer who plans to host a website needs to understand this important aspect that is, being very cheap or costly does not by any means specify the quality of service received.
The minute one decides to host, the first thing that strikes anyone is the cheap hosting rates in the newspaper.
When one starts checking the prices, he might find amazing range of plans and features. In such a case what would he do?
He would need to answer to these questions. What are the expectations from the site one is hosting? Whether it is a personal site where one wants to display flair or establish ones life on the net or is it a commercial site? Will the site be mission critical, that everything should be worked fine always? So that if at all it goes down, what will be the priority one would be attaching to having it up as soon as possible?
Once one gets the answer to all the questions, one has a plan of action to proceed. On the basis of ones priorities, one can shortlist ones choices among the wilds of hosts. One can finalize ones future host on the basis of a small set of criteria.
Firstly try short listing at least 15 hosting companies. Then carry on checking their inception dates, history and their values and ideology. Mostly these things are highlighted in the sites. Secondly try to check their pricing and try to average out the features received and the net pricing. Then finalize these companies in order of best value for money.
Half of the job is done once this is done. One should never choose the cheapest option available in haste. At this stage, one now needs to try and find news about the performance of these hosts. Locate hosting companies that were given more votes of support. Decide for oneself which hosts seem to have made mistakes that were least damaging to their clients by Checking the bad things said about these hosts. Keep in mind no one in this world so far is perfect. Mistakes happen, but one should give importance to how this mistake was rectified, during this crisis his clients had to face, what sort of attitude was taken up by the hosting provider and the preventive measures he has taken to prevent such future recurrences.
To find out the response time to ones queries from these hosts is the important step at this time. Response time one to two days after asking is the last thing any person wants in this digital age. More important criteria would be the quality of response as response time alone is not the main criteria. Did one get convinced with the sales person that ones site is important to them, can they provide ones needs well, and assure one of their quality services? In general they are worthy of consideration and able to understand and align with ones views on expectations, only then are they worthy of consideration. By the time one reaches this stage, one can now cross out quite a few hosts from the list.
Following up on the uptime of the servers, going to the forums that these hosts provide, and the harms these hosts cause to their clients and then the general sort of crowd one finds there. Beware! If one finds too technical a crowd, one could find ones site having downtimes as a result of the experiments these people try. Site should always be hosted with Hosting companies that provide Spartan features or is more in the line of hosting sites of ones kind. As they are specialized with the server features and specifically software’s one is using they are advisable thus ensuring stability and timely maintenance.
Ensuring that one knows the quality of bandwidth these hosting companies have, their disaster recovery plan and finally the average number of clients they host per server is the last and final criteria when choosing these hosts. Chances of server going down, higher probability of slower site accesses and more is more when one is having more hosts.
One gets the chance to eliminate a host or two with each stage of choosing, till one finally ends up with a smaller list of hosts. Find out who among them would offer better customer service and a wider variety of communications (forums, mailing lists, phone, chat, help-desk etc) by contacting these hosts personally.
Many web-hosts’ joining the bandwagon and starting with the simple intention of and had never thinking of a long-lasting growth was one of the biggest problem that most customers faced during the dot-com bust. They got swamped with the requests, once they started receiving more and more orders and thus could not properly scale their work force in tune with the growing needs and also could not ensure the quality of hardware etc they ordered. Finally they ended up closing shop or selling out to a bigger host. Therefore an indicator of the reliability of the host is the time that these hosts have been up and running.
One needs to be more careful on the server hardware being used if cheaper prices are being offered. Having quality food or just having food in either case one will survive, but the health of person having quality food will be better than the person having just food. Same is the case with ones site. More the acclaim and reviews ones site would receive and in the longer run would be better with superior provider. Only when one wants to host a temporary site for advertisements or wants to know critical importance of ones site only then one should decide on a cheap host.
