All About Web Hosting

There’s got to to be thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of web hosting operations out there. Things like reseller hosting make it easy for pretty much anyone to set up shop and host a few small sites. And there’s nothing wrong with that, in general.

But as with anything, you’ll tend to get some fly-by-night operations, and if you’re looking around for somewhere to host an important site, be sure not to get stung! One thing about the web, it’s relatively easy for someone to put up a website, and a good website can make an operationg look legit when it really isn’t!

So here some things to watch out for when checking out a potential host!

• Overselling – A problem that is epidemic in the business, this is promising far, far more than is reasonable for a hosting plan, basically taking advantage of user’s ignorance as to what is realistic pricing. For example, offer 5000 gigabytes of disk space on a plan that costs less that $10 – there’s no way a legitimate hosting provider could offer that, while storage space is cheap – it’s not that cheap! Customers of such plans will find that shut down if they actually try to use that much space…
• No data center – A data center is crucial for reliable web hosting. Sure, anyone with a little networking know-how can hook up a machine in their basement and host a site. But to host a site with 99% uptime and that’s capable of dealing with high traffic levels, you need a data center. If the hosting provider you’re checking out says nothing about their data center, that’s not a good sign!
• Support promises – Quality hosts put a lot of resources into their support staff. If a host’s site doesn’t at least give you some idea of what levels of support you can expect, that’s a warning sign. If they have no support at all (or it’s just the owner) – or if they’ve outsourced their support, that’s another warning sign!
• Web buzz – Do a google search on the host’s name. What comes up? Do they have a lot of “hosted by” type entries? That’s a good sign, it means they have a lot of sites hosted. Do you find good or bad reviews? Take everything with a grain of salt, after all most reviews you see have little or no checking of authenticity – there’s nothing to stop someone from writing fake reviews (good or bad!) about a web hosting company. But it’ll still give you at least some idea of what customers think about the company.

So do your research – a little effort up front can save you a lot of hassle down the road!