Article in Hosting & Security

Selecting the right web hosting company to host your website is a vital step towards running a successful website whether its a personal, hobby or business website, we will list 5 of the most important aspects you should look for when considering a web hosting provider.

1- Stability: A companies stability is probably one of the most important things you should make sure of when selecting a web hosting provider, a stable company means that the chances of it suddenly closing down and disappearing are very small, and yes, these things do happen, I've seen hundreds of web hosting companies pick up and leave due to the high competition in this business, thus the reason why you should check out how long has this company been in business, what do their customers say about them, does their client base grow or decrease, you might wonder where you can find this information, www.webhosting.info can provide you with all of the above information with a simple search.

2- Customer support: How is their custom support? are they knowledgeable? how fast do they reply to emails or trouble tickets? you should test these things, no harm in emailing them with simple questions, even if you already know the answers, email them and see how fast they respond, do they say they offer 24/7 live chat support? test them at 3am and see if they reply? same goes for 24/7 phone support.

3- Guarantees: What kind of guarantees do they offer? do they offer an uptime guarantee? lots of web hosts offer 99.9% uptime guarantee, what does that really mean? read their TOS and ask them if the compensate for the downtime if it was more than that 1%, you should also take note of their cancellation agreements and the SLA (Standard Level Agreement)

4- Infrastructure: Having a solid infrastructure is a vital aspect for providing quality service, make sure to check their website for information about their infrastructure and network, which data centre/s are they using, you can also Google their data centers name for more information about their connections and backup systems.

5- Choices for upgrading: Does the company offer an easy upgrade path? or do they offer it at all? you cant afford downtime or the hassle of moving your website from one host to another especially if your serious about your business, and by upgrading, I don't mean the upgrading of disk space and bandwidth, but they offer e-commerce features, can you add them later on if your current plan doesn't support it, do they offer spam filtering? how about any marketing tools?

These are probably the most important aspects you should look for in a web hosting company, hosting is not just about how much disk space and bandwidth they give you, its about all of these details that most people don't pay attention to.