GeekBusiness - Finding a Hosting

Choosing a supportive hosting company will make your job of building your internet business immensely easier. Choosing a bad host will disappoint your users and will cause you tremendous stress when you try to quickly move your entire web site (pages, scripts, and databases) to another host. There are a wide range of factors to consider when selecting a host. The following are some of the key factors to consider:

• Dedicated or Shared?
  Do not pay for service you will never use. If you are just trying to set up a small internet business to provide extra income, it is highly unlikely that you will ever need a dedicated server. If you reach that point, you can either upgrade or change hosts at that point. Dedicated servers can easily run $200 per month for fully managed environment from low cost hosts. Robust shared hosting accounts can be had for under $25 from nearly any host.
   
  
• Windows or Linux (Unix)?
  This is not just a question of personal opinion, it more a question of what type of scripting language you want to (or will) use. Linux hosts very regularly do not support ASP. Windows hosts do support ASP, and will often support PHP and Perl programming as well. (ASP, PHP, and Perl combined will cover the majority of web business implementations). If you are running a highly available large scale e-commerce site, you will likely run a dedicated server, and will typically be able to choose the operating system regardless of which host you choose.
   
  
• Online Forums
  The majority of hosting companies provide online forums for their customers to ask questions and communicate with each other. These forums are a potential gold mine of information. Look for situations where many users are complaining about different problems with the host. We're not talking about 5 or 10 users who continually complain (you will see these people), we are looking for consistent complaints about real problems with the host (downtime, lack of communication, billing problems, network connectivity issues). Single or sporadic complaints about these issues are not problematic. Read the entire thread of these complaints, and look to see if the host takes to the time to respond and if other customers pitch in to support the host (good things)
   
  
• Level of Support
  Browse the host's website. You will want to see user forums (mentioned above), a tutorial section that has well organized content, a faq that actually offers real help, and an online problem ticket system. You should not necessarily eliminate a host because they do not have all of these sections, but there needs to be some effort on their part to provide support to their customers (you). Hosts may keep some of these sections private for existing customers only. If that is the case browse the online user forums to see references to the private sections.
   
  
• Past Uptime, Not Promises of Uptime
  Uptime is a term often used to describe the percentage of time the server and network will be available. The higher the uptime, then better the situation for your business. Do not, however, take a hosts uptime guarantee at face value. No host will ever say that they will only give you 50% uptime, they will all give you guarantees of 99.9% uptime (or something similar). It really does not matter if they give you a partial refund when they fail to meet their guarantee, as your customers will really not care that you got the refund. Users want your site up when they want to visit it, period. The best indication of how well a prospective host will do with regards to uptime is to browse their online support forums, looking for forum posts about sites being down. There will be downtime, that is a fact of life. You want to find out if there are a wide range of users reporting downtime over a wide range of time periods. Single users reporting sporadic downtime, or a glut of users reporting downtime all at once (and only once) is a indication that the prospective host is up more than not.
   
  
• Compatibility With Your Site
  If you are implementing your internet business with a custom built or an out of the box solution, you will need to ensure compatibility of your application with the host environment. If you are not totally comfortable with making this determination, send an email to prospective hosts laying out the defined requirements. This will ensure that the host is capable of supporting your application, and as a side benefit, you will see how promptly the host responds to questions.