How to Tell Apart a Great Hosting Company From a Good One
How to Tell Apart a Great Hosting Company From a Good One
Long gone are the days when you could judge the reliability of an online business by its outstanding website design, flattering testimonials and truthful claims. With the emergence of top notch packaged graphical templates, any individual or firm can set up an extraordinary looking website in minutes with minimal skills.
This is not what used to be the case, when services of graphic designers and web developers were highly expensive, and we could at least assume that the owner of a well designed website has at least a measure of invested interest in the business to keep it reputable. The trend has now changed, and it's difficult to differentiate if a hosting business belongs to a huge company or an individual reseller.
It's usually prudent to put more faith in a company instead of an individual, due to the commitment of long term business. An individual acting as a reseller can easily shut down operations in the short run, leaving his clients in a troubled state. A company also has group support to provide round the clock technical support, which is something that a lone reseller cannot do. Also, with a larger pool of support personnel, your hosting problems stand a higher chance of being solved sooner, if at all. For these reasons, it's good to be looking at a very large company that's been around for a long time, especially in the web hosting business. An individual reseller simply does not have the financial means and human resource to cater for hosting crisis when it occurs.
Having gone through the company aspect, it's time to hit the hardware zone. As truth stands with all types of businesses, the pricier a hosting package, the better it is. However, there are a few common tricks being employed by hosting companies so lets take a look at the bandwidth aspect. While there are many companies that provide abundant hard disk space, their bandwidth speed is limited. I've had hosting companies providing speeds at 1Mbps to 32Mbps, and it make a huge difference if you're trying to serve web pages to 20 simultaneous users as opposed to just one. Also be cautious of those claiming to provide unlimited traffic, because there is no such thing. If such a company makes such a claim, and provides just 1Mbps of bandwidth, then you could only utilize a maximum of 320000 Megabytes or 320Gigs in a month.
This 'unlimited claim' as you can see, is actually quite limited. Bandwidth and traffic are two methods of calculating the same thing. And I can tell you that with 320Gigs a month of traffic, your server will be able to stream just one video clip at any given moment to a single user. The other catch always cover 'unlimited storage'. Although companies claim of unlimited storage, they will have other fine prints saying that you cannot use your web hosting as a storage dump. What's the point of offering 'unlimited storage' if all you will put up are HTML files? If anything, these tactics are used to boost the attractiveness of their hosting package. If they do actually get a customer who over utilizes their resources, they would just remove that customer from their account. This would allow them to make outrageous offerings to the 98% of users who would never utilize more than a fraction of their expected usage.
Lastly, do not fall victim to bogus testimonial pages, as too many companies simply fake these. Then, there are affiliates that stand to gain commissions from your singing up that they would most surely provide a five star rating without having actually tried the web host they are promoting. If you're looking for a PHP/Linux web hosting service, I would highly recommend 247-host.com or Pair Networks, as I'm using these services for many years now and their service never fall short of expectations. These are large companies that's been around too long to want to risk upsetting customers.
As a final piece of advice, try to find a host that accepts PayPal payment. It's much easier to get a refund if their service is not as promised, as the threat of their PayPal account being suspended acts as a strong deterrent against fraud attempts. With PayPal, it is easy to lodge a report on fraud, and also to cancel any recurring subscriptions from your PayPal account management page.
A great hosting company will provide long term peace of mind, well worth the slightly higher price that they charge.
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