Things to Look Out For When Choosing a Web Hosting Company

October 21st, 2010 · No Comments

When choosing a web hosting company there are a few things to look out for, things that should influence your final decision. The time you spend doing research before making your decision is an investment well worth making. Simply by considering a few key facts and asking pertinent questions, a great deal of heartache can be saved further down the line.

Uptime

Firstly consider the levels of uptime offered by each provider. Any provider who claims 100% uptime is probably not telling the truth. It is better to ask for real results of uptime from, say, the previous year to see what uptime levels you might expect over an extended period of time. 99.99-something percent should be expected, but it will pay to see concrete results.

Security

Payment Card Industry DSS compliance is important. Even if you are not going to use online payments, PCI DSS compliance ensures that your provider has achieved certain levels of security that can only be of benefit to all the provider’s customers.

Management

Your provider should be able to offer you a range of hosting options including managed and unmanaged hosting. The latter may be cheaper but it puts the onus on you as the website owner to maintain the server, maintain uptime and generally do the work that is involved in providing a constant level of service. Managed server provision will tend to be more expensive, but much of the work will be done for you.

Support

Levels of support from web hosting providers varies and it will pay to see quite how far the provider will go in helping you out. A good first indicator is the response you get from a provider when enquiring about levels of support. Full, open and honest answers to your questions will give some indication of the future levels of support that you are going to receive. Providers who are reluctant to give out information are probably not going to be the most reliable of service-givers.

In general, your impressions of each provider should be created by as much investigation as possible. Providers unwilling to help you out at this stage of your decision-making process are unlikely to be your best choice. Good luck!