Entering the minefield of the hosting company choices
Anybody who has worked in the online industry for more than a short period will understand the importance of having a good hosting company. Whether you have been let down by a negligent company in the past or you are simply trying to find the best deal to avoid any disappointments, it should be your top priority.
Even just for one individual website, you should have the best hosting company possible. However, the research process of hosting companies becomes harder when you factor in two huge parts of the process;
The competition out there – there are literally hundreds of hosting companies, meaning constant battling for the top spot and even the scraps at the bottom!
with a large volume of clients – A web hosting firm can have thousands of clients. So check out the review, but bear in mind the chances are that at one stage somebody has decided to complain and leave them a bad review.
This means that drilling through for the genuine guys is not too hard, simply discount firms that seem to have more opinions than good. People will find a reason to shout down a company for anything at all, so don’t let one bad review in a stack of good ones put you off.
However, if you are still struggling to come up with a fair and obvious solution in your research we can recommend criteria that have never let us down, personally. There are some obvious things that you need to look out for when hiring a company to take on the important task of hosting your website. Remember, your website could be your entire business so having it running 99.9% of the time is absolutely vital. Make sure you look at;
Disk Space
How much space are you allowed? If they say Unlimited, it’s time to investigate. Unfortunately, very few things in this world are unlimited and web space is not one of them. Call the support team up, or drop them an e-mail, and find out what their own opinion is of the word unlimited. Get some figures and compare them against what you are being told elsewhere – do they stack up?
Bandwith
Some hosting companies restrict your monthly/yearly bandwidth. This may be a problem if you have a high number of visitors, or indeed, large files on your site to be downloaded. Keep an eye on it and check with your hosting company what packages they offer.
Support
If anything ever goes wrong, you don’t want to be left in the lurch by a slow and dour support team. Look for somebody who can provide good, quick service that actually feels like they want to help. This builds confidence in their abilities so that when things do go wrong, you aren’t stressing about a team of jokers running your business offline for a few days!
Knowledge
If you are simply managing websites, you may not be entirely clued up on the hosting side of things. Managing every other sector of your business is vital, but you should be looking for a hosting firm that can give you the answers you need when you need them. Look for a hosting team with a strong knowledge base already on-site, and a staff that can give you answers to the difficult questions that get deferred around the whole business at other firms.
Backup your account details
Keep tabs on all your account details and store them safely. Your hosting and email storage is important to you, so make sure the main account password is strong and you know what it is in an emergency.
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