How Find a Good Hosting Company.

It’s a real dilemma these days as by spending some amount any hosting company can prevail at all possible location of customer search like google, yahoo, forums, market places etc. thus wherever you go you find few hosting companies haunting you.

The other aspect relates to huge, throw away costs some of the hosting companies offer, thus customer without knowing how much space and bandwidth really he needs gets engaged with these hosting companies.

To find a good hosting company, you can always search in Yahoo, google and msn for a while. May be you need to go to about 2 to3 pages depth.

While searching prefer key words like quality, performance, etc. Also you may like to prefer to mention your location with every key word, if you are keen to find a hosting company in your region (which is always a bonus).

Omit key words like “low cost”, “Cheaper” etc as firstly these are not indication of good web hosting services and secondly the hosting service providers have normally littered the net with these.

When you start analyzing the hosting companies, you can keep following points with you which not only explain what to look for but also how to ascertain its effectiveness:-

*Feature Offered. These could be:-

Space and Bandwidth. First determine how much you need, do not fall prey to big offers just for nothing. Most of these are very simple tricks. Based on years of experience hosting companies know that an average customer does not use more than 100 Mb space and 300 MB bandwidth thus whatever bigger than that is offered is just an offer to attract customers.
Email and Database.The number of emails per account should only effect you as per your needs, do not get over influenced by ‘unlimited” when you know you do not need more than 10 in any case. Use of mysql will be important if you need a data base driven site or contents.
Other Features These could be free scripts for guest boot, chat and web development etc. Most hosting companies do have these in their hosting panels. These make things easier for you if you are to use these. So give a plus to hosting company for that.

What kind of support they are offering ie email only, ticketing system, phone support and a toll free phone. Give an additional point for each service offered. You may need only one of few of these, but eventually it may be important to have a hosting service provider with more kind of mechanisms to be reached to.

Note the response time to your sales requests. Better host respond within 4 hours. Note that the auto responder is not to be rated as response, though that does indicate a bit effort.

Do they have physical office location. It may be a indication of serious business, this also ensures that you do not run into part timer. You can always ascertain it from the contact us page, by calling them, seeing if only a mobile number is given and not a land number etc. Its not that a part timer or the one who cannot afford an office location cannot be good in provision of services, yet generally the one with physical offices may mean a bit more settled ones. This may not be totally true in all cases

Price / Cost. Not always the ones who are cheaper are good and not always ones who are expensive offer high quality services. Better is to stay away from two extremes in cost. Mostly one can think and expect that the ones asking a bit higher prices should be able to afford management of things better.

Popularity A web host might have the best feature offered, unbeatable customer support and reliability in place but without an effective marketing plan, it will go bust too. Let’s face it. If a web hosting provider does not have sufficient members and steady growth of new members, it’s very difficult to survive in this highly competitive industry.

Do not go for the more than 2 to 3 pages in search engines. The hosting company should be effective enough to appear in these pages.
Sponsored listing shows interest of company to promote themselves but not always an indication of good hosting company.
Read reviews and see top 10 list. Though in most cases these are the ones haunting the net with their money and not always quality.

[b]Reliability[/B. Every web hosting service provider will have more than 99% listed on their site. But few have the courage to provide independent prove of their uptime. Ask for it. A hosting company should always have a monitoring service and should be able to provide you a report of the same.

These were some very basic things I could think of, there could be many coming up in subsequent discussion.
Regards

Wow, you say its very basic but it is very detailed! Well done a very good article here!

Well done an dthis artcile is very informative and detailed!

Thanks for the in-depth advice.
Rarely are Top Ten lists any indication of a provider's quality of service - moreso reflecting the review site's marketing strategy.
From a provider's point of view, competing on a global scale puts you up against fierce competition, but the real goldmine continues to be a more local niche. One strategy is to focus on NEW businesses, that will purchase hosting services from someone - why not you?
I'm not aware of any provider's stating they offer subpar quality or performance, so narrowing your search to keywords like quality or performance probably won't help. LOL. But mentioning your location may have real benefits - this really depends on your targeted audience.

You write a good list about what is important to find in a good host

And it can be summarized into:

Reliability/performance

Features

Customer support

And remember to have a look at customer reviews first too

I assume to find decent web hosting service provider you need to search and search and try and try. Only your own experience will give you the best prompt
Cheers

When looking at reviews/testimonials, have to be suspicius because its the webhost that is allowing which ones to publish on their site

I have visited alot of review websites and alot of them are ranked. How can one website host completely dominate on one review site, then sink on another review site. Alot of them look completely made up. I would like to start an online business but dont really know what I am looking for because all ofthese review sites have completely different info.

On the other hand, there are some that I have seen that do not even rank hosts. Some that describe a few packages offered by the host with the price. Another one I saw had 30 hosts with information on each package and the price for the different billing cycles. Thats more than what some review sites do. They just send you right back to the company without giving any information.

I agree about the "review" sites. Probably the most honest one is a guy who looks at all these different web forums and goes by the number of complaints or praise.

That's probably more "honest" than the ones actually owned by the top rated hosting company but it keeps me off because none of my customers come to these forums. So by basing his ratings on approvals & complaints he gets the big hosts with lots of customers but missed those of us whose customers didn't find us through the forums anyway.

But generally that's a good list of how to search...
One thing I always suggest is that if anything is unclear about whether they could host your site... no matter what it is you need, call and ASK first, if they don't have phone (not good) then at least e-mail and get a clarification on whatever it is you are unclear about to be sure there's no problems later on. Usually the problems you see people complain about from a host were something buried in the "fine print" of the TOS or SLA and then the customer breaks that restriction and the host with the great looking plan cuts them off. Better to ask before than after.

Like the article says look for reliability than can be 3rd party verified and if you have a business site look for backup policies & things that could save you in a crash.

Also you can ask for some references of people hosted by them. While they won't give you unhappy customers of course any customer can tell you how fast support is handled and such things as uptime.

AND do your research, if you have a personal site or blog or whatever a kid with a reseller plan making a few extra bucks to get through college (or high school) might be alright. But for a business anybody on a VPS or reseller is only as good as their host and you may not know how good their host is (or how to find out).

If you are going to have any type business site it's best to be with someone in the hosting business for years with their own servers. If your business depends on your host you need to be far more careful in choosing that host.

Great article though, I like the host explanation of the average size of sites and traffic they use. I use one of my clients as an example all the time:

He has 4 sites in his account:

1. His personal company site with employee e-mails & such as well as the site including a few videos.
2. A very busy forum (1,500 members, average page views daily 3,250) and it allows posing photos.
3. A photo gallery site linked to the forum so people can post their own galleries
4. An e-commerce store that handles orders every day, not super busy but busy enough to require employees for filling orders & such. Has 100's of item's with illustrations of many.

Currently he is using (account total-all sites) just over 1.5 GB of disk space (less than 1,600 MB) for all the sites and his monthly transfer (bandwidth) averages 4.5 GB approx and has yet to break 5 GB though I'm sure as he continues to grow he will.

...you get the idea. Compared to your one new forum with 50 users or your one 5 page static
web site about your business it's WAY bigger, but doesn't use even 2GB and never 5 GB bandwidth... so to the newbies that can give you an idea of what to expect from your site

That is good idea and I support it, but for the new people sometimes that impossible to find the customer of the company and this is extra difficult task for the people which are new

This is really nice. It can help out alot of people (new commers into the industry).

hi,
that was a very useful post, it'll be helpful for sure.. i had my site registered with <<URL deleted>>

Great advice, keep it coming.

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thanks, this will be helpful when i switch to some more hosting solutions, as i have only few sites, but present to expand

Great article, good read!

Great example, New Idea. A lot of prospects grossly over estimate the amount of resources they'll need upfront.