In today’s web hosting world it is difficult to select a web hosting company that truly meets your requirements. There are several reasons for this. The Internet is a great equalizer. High quality web hosting companies look fairly similar to fly-by-night companies that rent cheap $99 servers, install control panels and set up shop as sophisticated web hosting companies. As a customer you eventually pay with poor site performance, lost time on configuring the server and customers who could not wait for your site to respond.
These are true horror stories of web hosting. The site is down for 12-24 hours. Its webmaster is sending “urgent” emails, but receiving automated canned answers. He/she keeps waiting for a resolution for hours or days. Every hour the site is down, it is losing traffic, reputation and revenues.
Below is a list of five things you should be aware of before selecting a web hosting company:
Inferior servers
In the highly competitive market for web hosting today, web hosting companies almost always scrimp on backend servers. They rent cheap servers with no quality assurance or performance monitoring. Since they don't own their hardware, they are unable to fix the problems. Imagine a couple of college kids in India renting a few servers in a US based data center, installing some open source software and launching a web hosting company. (One does exist with hundreds of customers on it !!)
Technical Support
Most web hosting companies offer 24/7 technical support but don’t live up to the expectation. You have to wait hours or even days before you get a response from a qualified person. Often, not at all. It takes experience and in-depth knowledge of the servers, software and the network to make it all work. A decent web hosting company should offer robust service with a variety of support options, support tickets, live support chat, email support and phone support.
Shared Web Hosting
Shared web hosting is a good option if the web hosting company manages the customers and server allocation well. Web hosting companies attempt to overload the server with clients in order to maximize their revenue per server. This can lead to slow, poor-performing websites during peak load times that ultimately drive site visitors away.
Unlimited space and bandwidth
Often web hosting companies offer “unlimited” space and bandwidth in their plans. In reality there is no such thing. No matter how powerful the web server is, its storage space is limited, and it can only transfer a limited amount of data through the pipes per second. When they cram many sites on each server, the total bandwidth is limited by the pipes feeding that server split between those sites. If they claim they are providing unlimited features without any conditions, they are lying to you.
Ask yourself or your team, how large is your site likely to be? Would you really need 500GB of hard disk storage? How much space bandwidth does a similar site need? Check it out under our web hosting products table.
Up-selling
Most web hosting companies use bait and hook pricing strategies. They snag customers at a low price per month, but charge for each service request. For example, many charge for setting up of applications like blogging, databases etc.
ServerPoint offers reliable and affordable web hosting and domain registration, dedicated server, blog, Virtual Private Server (VPS) and enterprise managed services that surpass other web hosting companies, in uptime, features and overall value.
