subject: Knowing The Difference Between A Bad Web Hosting Company And A Good Web Hosting Company [print this page] For people that are new to setting up a website, deciding on a web hosting company can be quite a daunting task. With so many hosting packages out there offering a wide range of packages, it is sometime difficult to separate which offer is good or bad. A website is an important asset for any business, regardless of whether it is a corporate site or an e-commerce site. Your hosting provider plays an important role in ensuring that your site is accessible to your customers. It is therefore important to know the difference between a good and bad web hosting company. Here are a few key criteria that should help you make your choice.
Hosting Reliability
This is possibly the most important aspect of web hosting. Most often, if you are a small business, your website will be hosted on a shared server. This means that the server platform hosts a variety of different websites from different clients. This is a very effective way of ensuring that hosting packages are cost effective and that maintenance is easy to perform. The difference between a good and bad company comes in with how they sell and manage the shared space. A good company will have a maximum allocation and they will ensure that the capacity of the server is not exceeded. A bad company simply wants to sell as much space as possible to make money. They will often oversubscribe a server which means that it is very slow and may be down for long periods of time. This means that your site will not be accessible to customers and you could lose business. Also, if your site is slow, it will reflect badly on your business.
When you sign up for shared hosting, get details on the total server data space and how that is allocated. Query the volume of sites hosted on the server and how that will impact your site. A good hosting company will recognize your concerns and be able to give you specific answers. A bad company is often evasive and gives only general answers that don't commit to any level of service. A good server will have an uptime guarantee and this is usually proudly promoted to their customers.
Hosting Maintenance
This links in strongly with hosting reliability. Your server will only be reliable if it is properly maintained. This is an aspect of hosting that easily separates the good and bad hosting companies. A bad hosting company is reactive and only deals with problems as they arise. They rarely perform regular maintenance so problems are only discovered once they have caused the server to slow down or crash completely. A good hosting company is proactive in their maintenance efforts. They know that technology is constantly changing so they need to be constantly looking for ways to improve reliability and maintain security. They will run upgrades and regularly check the reliability of the server. In addition, they do all of this behind the scenes. Any upgrades or changes to the server are done in the early hours of the morning when the least amount of people are likely to be accessing the server. So during office hours, you will have full accessibility to your site. From time to time, you may get notifications that upgrades have been done but this is done simply to keep you informed.
Hosting Support
This is a strong indicator of whether your hosting company is good or bad. A good hosting company will have an online and telephonic support desk. The support desk will be manned by professional and knowledgeable staff who can answer your questions on a wide range of hosting topics. You should not need to endlessly stay on hold in order to get through to them. If you send an email query, they generally responds within 24 hours.
The support desk can also answer queries when you are shopping around for different hosting packages. If you call them with queries on the different types of hosting packages they have available, they should be able to provide you with accurate answers. If they can't, you should be cautious of purchasing a hosting package with them. On the other end of the scale, a typically bad hosting company will have a help desk that really isn't much help at all. They may have a toll-free number but you generally can't get through to anyone. If the phone is answered, it is usually by someone who cannot answer your queries.
