How to choose a Web Hosting Company?

Nowadays, anybody can afford to order a feature-packed web hosting plan for next to nothing; however, affordable price is not the only criterion which should be considered when purchasing web hosting services. In this article, it explains the basics of what you should look for in choosing a web hosting company, not just concentrating on the best price and features, but also on reliability and honesty. You're investing your money and effort into finding paying customers and you wouldn't like to lose them in order to save a few dollars per month on a web hosting service.

1. Downtime guarantee?

Having a personal website go down is a minor inconvenience; having a business website go down is a serious matter. What amount of profit would you lose if your site had been down for a week? Long downtime may be very harmful to today's companies which spend large amounts of money on advertising their websites. Essentially, there are two rules regarding reliability that one should look at:

a. You should check if there is an uptime guarantee offered. A truly service-oriented provider will also give a money-back guarantee, offering a discount or free service as compensation for downtime. Any company which avoids taking responsibility won't put much effort into the service. Check on their Service Level agreement these information should be clearly stipulated.

b. You should definitely not go with a company claiming 100% uptime, as there is no such thing as a server with 100% uptime. If anyone ever claims their server has a 100% uptime they are either lying or they don't perform the necessary upgrades that prevent a machine from being compromised.

2. Backup

There is no hosting company which is safe against different types of technical and programical failures, so make sure that the company runs scheduled backups. The other advice would be always having a backup of your website yourself, as you never know what might happen. PLESK, which is the most popular web hosting management software at this time, has a very comfortable backup-making tool. It allows you to backup files and databases quickly and easily, so backups are no longer a problem.

3. Unlimited bandwidth and web space?

In web hosting industry, the adage "you get what you pay for" is almost universally applicable. Do not fall for hosts offering unlimited allowances, as there is no unlimited bandwidth, nor unlimited web space. Host's pay for each GB of bandwidth themselves. Hard drives also aren't free, so how can they say it's unlimited? They simply are performing false advertising in order to attract customers. The average website doesn't use more than 1GB of bandwidth per month; the customer is happy as he bought something "unlimited" and the host gets a new customer, which won't cost them any more than $10 per month. But imagine what would happen if You had a website, burning much more bandwidth than an average site does, and You signed up with a hosting company offering unlimited traffic? The host would simply suspend your account and tell you, that it was using too much bandwidth.

4. Will you really own your domain name?

When you buy a domain name together with a website hosting package, make sure the host will register the domain name under your name. It usually should be written in their FAQ, but, if there is no such information, simply contact them. This will also give you an opportunity to check how fast their customer support team replies to enquiries. If the hosting company registers domains under someone else's name, you may have problems switching hosting providers later. If you were in such situation, you would have to file for a Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which costs much more than both domain name and web hosting service together.

5. Control Panel

For ease of maintenance, a feature called a Control Panel is a necessity; this tool will normally allow for regular maintenance, be it email mailbox additions/deletions, password resets, web additions, web statistics and so on. If the site is for any sort of business, this is an absolute must. The most popular web hosting management software currently available is PLESK. It's a next-generation web hosting control panel system that allows you to manage your domain through a web interface. The idea is to transfer as much of the control of managing your web site to you; you have the ability to manage all aspects of e-mail, files, backup, FTP, CGI scripts, and web site statistics.

6. Network and Server infrastructure

Most bigger and reliable hosting company has invested better equipment and servers for their customers. They usually own branded servers like DELL which provides 24 x 7 supports and prompt hardware replacement to ensure good uptime. They are probably members of some Network Information Centres like APNIC ( Asia Pacific Network Information Centre) have their own IP addresses. It is an investment for a web hosting company to enroll for such network membeship to obtain their own IP addresses as involved expensive equipment and extensive amount of network knowledge to deploy such network infrastructure and only the bigger hosting companies able to afford.

7. Servers and Datacentres Location

You should host your site with some local providers. The advantage here is the ease of dealing with them (they are after all easily accessible by phone call or a visit), your familiarity with the local laws and easy recourse to those laws should it be necessary. It should be your choice if your target audience is local (eg a local fast food delivery service). On the other hand, hosting it in Singapore has the advantage of faster access for what is probably the largest number of your local and overseas visitors.

8. Give them a call now!

This will give you an opportunity to find out if they are contactable, and email to check how fast their customer support team replies to your enquiries. Some hosting companies might not have contact number on their website and you would have difficulties reaching them by phone.