The selection of a good hosting provider is not an easy task at all: a bad choice can lead your entire project to a total fiasco, even when it’s an excellent idea on itself. Imagine the catastrophic implications of your site being offline at the moment when the search engines are trying to index it. Or imagine how disappointed you will be when you discover that your hosting company takes ages to respond to your inquiries, especially the urgent ones!
This is the reason why I offer below some tips about the features that an adequate hosting provider must provide.
It is very important for your hosting provider to offer different ways of technical support, especially immediate ways of support, be it through chats, instant messages or a telephone number (several companies offer toll-free numbers for that purpose). Another valuable tool is a discussion forum where you can see what problems arose with other customers and what solutions were offered by the company or by other users. When help is offered only by e-mail, we can never be sure that our concerns will be answered quickly enough. Before contracting a provider, ask them all the questions that you deem important and use different ways of contact to ask these questions; make sure you receive your reply within 24 hours, otherwise, move on.
Check the guarantees offered by the provider; read their refund policy; guaranteed uptime; privacy policy as well as authorized types of content. Don’t contract a company that doesn’t have clear policies, make sure that you can get your money back if your hosting provider does not comply with their responsibilities.
The most important point in the selection of a hosting provider is the reputation. What are its users’ opinions, what is its history? There’s a great variety of discussion forums related to this subject, where users share their positive experiences as well as their frustrations. Pay more attention to negative feedbacks: at what moments did they occur, about what specific topics? What about these users’ websites: what were their features, their content? How different are they from your website’s?
Measure the speed of the hosting provider’s response, this will give you an idea of the performance of the company’s servers. There’s a set of tools for this purpose: some of them verify the speed of the DNS response (when someone visits your site, their provider’s DNS server will be consulted and it is best to provide a response as quickly as possible); and others that calculate the speed of server response and check if they are in a backbone.(dnsstuff, iwebtool)
Before you select a hosting provider you must have a clear vision of your site’s present and future. Will you be having any kind of e-commerce on your website? In such case you should verify that your hosting package comes with appropriate tools, such as osCommerce, SSL for secure connections, etc. Need to collect user’s feedback? See if your hosting offers phpBB or similar forum software. I recommend you find a hosting provider that not only comes with the tools you need immediately, but also with those that you may need in future, at later stages of your web project development, - make sure they can be easily installed and at a competitive price.
Have in mind the contents of your website as well as the average amount of users who will visit it. A website that distributes multimedia content or has a great number of visitors, must pay closer attention to storage space as well as required bandwidth. Keep in mind that when you publish videos, photos or mp3 files, you will need a considerable space on hard disk, and a decent bandwidth. Verify the price that your hosting provider charges for exceeded bandwidth; it can affect your finances if you don’t think ahead. The following tool will give you an estimate of the bandwidth that you will need for your website - bandwidth estimation tool.
When you finally decided for a hosting provider, remember to take advantage of the discount offers. Many hosting companies offer excellent discounts for longer contract periods; most hostings offer considerable discounts if you sign up for one or two years.
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