subject: Five Points That Make A Brilliant Web Host Provider [print this page] Five Points That Make A Brilliant Web Host Provider
Find a good web host is extremely difficult. Shopping on the Internet is always difficult to determine who is worth their salt. Producing a 'professional' looking website isn't difficult. However, you don't know about the company behind that website. They could be a one man band.
Reliability is a very important factor for a business web host. You cannot afford for your website to be offline when a potential client is visiting. Worse still, if your business relies on your website for orders, you cannot afford it to be down for too long. When you are researching webhosts, try and work out which ones are going to provide excellent uptime. Most web hosts monitor their own uptime, and publish the results. Remember, 99.9% uptime might sound good, but do the maths and it actually equates to a lot of downtime.
Good support from your web host is absolutely crucial. If something goes wrong at 2am, you need to know you can get help. Picture your website is down and your backups are corrupt. Having your website on hand will make and break your business. Web hosting support can come in many forms. At the business end, you can expect business hours telephone support, which in itself is real peace of mind.
A good web host will run business quality hardware, on a reliable network. There is the option for a web host to use cheap servers. Try and steer clear of these hosts! Business class web hosting should be run on redundant RAID arrays with regular incremental backups. Their network should have lots of capacity for breathing space, and offer real redundancy.
It is crucial a web host has brilliant knowledge of their product and service. Remember, as with the bedroom host with the fantastic website- anyone can claim to have the knowledge. However, do they walk the walk as well as talking the talk? Thankfully there are simple methods to catch these webhosts out. Email them some questions, even better, phone them. You can soon tell a confident, knowledgeable web hosting company by their responses.
Experience like knowledge is very important in making a good web host. Experience comes in very useful when things go wrong. Those web hosts that have experience worse case scenarios are much better equipped to look after your interests.
A vibrant community always shows a good web host. Having a community isn't the be all and end all. Only some corporate web hosts will operate a form. However web hosts that do keep the doors open, have to be commended for doing so.
There are many points that make up a good website host, and these are just some of them. One final piece of advice is to ensure you fully research your next web host before signing up with them.
