When you are considering various services to host your online business, you need to be very critical of certain attitudes and practices that will have a direct effect on your success as an Internet Marketer. It's one thing to look for a service to host your hobby site or family contact site and quite another when you are counting on reliability, technical support and a reasonable response time when you are having a problem with your business site. Before you drag out your credit card and purchase hosting services, here's nine areas you should investigate first:
Generally, you should be able to find some of this information on their sales site, but, if not, ask how long the company has been in business and how many sites they have hosted. It wouldn't be a bad idea to ask for a few URLs so you can see how fast the pages and the links to other pages load.
Next, you need to know something about their data center and their backup processes that will protect your website in case of a power outage or other acts of Nature and equipment failures. Find out what their guarantees are for uptimes. When their servers go down, your customers cannot find you, costing you sales. You should be able to find out their bandwidth allocation for each hosting level in their online sales literature. If not, ask.
Security is the third area you should question. It is important that you know how they will protect your business from viruses, spamming and hijacking. If they don't monitor site security and protect you 24/7, find another hosting service.
Hosting services normally offer several plans for you to choose from. These plans offer different options designed to cover a wide array of needs. You should ask how many sites they host on the web server used for your plan. In this case, less is better. It would also be handy to know how they protect and host your databases. "Will your database be hosted on another server?" is the question to ask.
Though all of these areas are important to investigate, the area you should be very concerned about is technical support. Anything less than 24/7 is putting your business at risk. You need to know how to contact Technical Service when you need to. Get a phone number and call it once in a while at different times during the day and night. Make sure you do it on weekends and holidays, if one is close to when you are planning on purchasing hosting services.
If there's no response, you will be tossing your business into a wasteland. If something goes wrong on their servers and you cannot reach a live person, you are helpless. Email contact and Help Desk inquiries are not the same as 24/7 personal contact with a person who is supposed to protect your business.
A proactive approach to hosting will save you a lot of headaches in the future. Don't be afraid to ask questions and wait for the answers. It's YOUR business, after all.
Dan Thompson is a veteran website designer and has used numerous web hosts in his time. Dan specializes in writing web host reviews, his latest website is a review of the popular web host, Hostmonster. You can view Dan's latest web hosting review at http://www.hostmonster-the-review.com |
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