Web Hosting - What to look for when shopping around for Reliable Web Hosting

Greetings Warriors,

When starting your online business, the most important piece of the puzzle is not your sales copy, graphics, videos, or any other marketing material you have. It is your web hosting.

Let's face it, if you have a host that goes down every day or will ban you for having a little over 10 visitors a day, you will not make any money. This is not the right way to build a business and surely your clients will let you know this.

I've been around the forum for a while now, and our hosting services are by far the most successful and talked about hosting solutions for warriors. However, I have noticed a few "hosts" spawning here and there. I think we all ought to know what to look for when making a decision on who you will trust with your business, your livelihood, the service that will charge your clients and deliver your products should be up and running at all times.

What you should look for in a hosting company:

1-How long have they been in business?

Many new hosts will tell you they have been in business for years, but how to verify this? Use these handy Domain Tools to find out when the domain for this Hosting Business was registered. If it was registered less than 1 Year ago, chances are you are dealing with a fly-by-night host. Also take note of the expiration of their main domain. Established hosts own all extensions of their domains for the next 10 years, if your host registered their domain 2 months ago and it expires next year, this is a red flag.

2- Are they publicly available?

If your hosting company is hiding their who-is information, chances are they don't want you to know they are not real. Check the domain's whoIs information here:
Whois Lookup & Domain Availability Search | DomainTools

If the whoIs privacy is enabled, this is not a good sign. Any host that is legitimately doing business will have a publicly available address. It's important to know you are not dealing with "Joe Shmoe" running an old PC as a server in his garage. There are great hosting plans available starting at $1 at Host The Name - You don't need to put your emerging business in the hands of amateurs, go with the pros, and keep your money in your pocket.

3- Is your host's website hosted on the same server as yours?

This is a no-no and if you see this, you should immediately backup, pack up and leave. A host should have their own servers for their main domain, in case of any system failure. Of course they will not tell you this, so how can you find out? use intoDNS.com a free tool which will reveal many things for you:

Example:
intoDNS: hostthename.com - check DNS server and mail server health

Look at the reverse PTR records if it shows the same as your website while hosted there, you are on the same server.

Example 2:
HostTheName.com - Cheap Website Hosting | SEO Hosting | Cheap SEO Hosting

Look at the section where it says
Reverse IP:
1 other site is hosted on this server.

If your host in question says "300 other sites hosted on this server" then they are obviously sharing the server with you, not a good idea.

4-How efficient and available is their support staff?

It is pretty much standard nowadays for hosting companies to provide 24/7/365 customer support via live chat and support ticket systems. The reason for this is, we host websites from all over the world, even if its 4 AM here in Los Angeles, it is 6 PM in India, and our clients from India, Europe, Asia, they all deserve the same level of support as anyone else. Plus, you know Internet Marketers are ngiht owls, chances are you WILL be working on your site at 4 AM, make sure your "host" is not ran by one guy who is sleeping at that time

5- How many people are involved in the support process?

Despite what your prospective host may tell you, support is so expensive that not all startup hosts can afford it. 95% of start-up hosts are ran by a "one -man team". If you are OK with putting your business in the hands of a one man team, go for it. If you are in business to make money, find a host wth real support and a real staff rotating 24/7 to keep fresh eyes and iron out any issues that you may encounter.

If you submit a ticket or log into chat, and "Joe Schmoe" happens to be the "operator" helping you every day every time, somethings going on.

6- Avoid buying hosting from resellers. Buy hosting which is proven to be effective for the masses.

I know, we all have to start somewhere, but for the purposes of aspiring business owners hosting their first site? there are much more affordable web hosting solutions than having to make a desperate move and cramp up into a reseller account.

Simple Fact:
Resellers don't have the power to change server wide settings. Most of them are not certified system administrators or don't have enough experience to actually host your sites. Sure, anyone can set up a cpanel account, but resellers don't deal with server management and thus are not experienced if anything happens. Serious hosting solutions are available at Host The Name for less that $1 per month, why risk it by going anywhere else?

Another trend I've noticed is some hosts offering hosting from a VPS they have bought. This is also a bad idea for the end user. VPS are not as good as dedicated servers. Yes, they give the owner of the VPS the tools necessary to manage it like a server, but a visualization of the real thing is simply not the real thing. Again, lok up your host, and see if they are really using their own servers, or are they using reseller accounts or VPS to cut costs and give you a cpanel shared by 300 other people on a small VPS which can be suspended or wiped out by a hard drive failure at any time? Don't say I didn't warn you

7- Make sure your "host" is clear on their backups policy.

Backups are a host's worse nightmare. Although every host will tell you the same thing, backups are always, always your responsibility. They should have some sort of backup of your account if you've been on a shared server for a reasonable amount of time. All backup policies vary from host to host, but I've seen small hosts at WSO Threads go down in flames, without a backup plan. All their websites and clients websites hosted on one VPS. Don't put your business in the hands of "maybe" get some assurance, and place your business on servers proven to be the right choices for at least 20,000 + domains.

8- Always read between the lines, don't get distracted by fancy lingo from the hosts.

There are many types of hosting. We offer Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting, VPS Hosting, and SEO Hosting as our main structured plans. However, there are some hosts out there right now offering cloud hosting for $1 a month. Understand, real cloud hosting is expensive. If they charged $1 a month for unlimited cloud hosting we would be buying it from them!

Do not be fooled by the hosts attempting to sell you on a cloud hosting dream. CloudFlare is a technology which simply manages DNS and has many DNS servers across the globe. When your domain is requested from a certain part of the world, the DNS server closest to it will respond faster than a DNS server which is thousands of miles away. But what is the difference? MILLISECONDS. If your servers have CloudFlare enabled, more power to you. Is it necessary? NO. If this is confusing to you, and you will go with a flaky provider just because you think it's cool, think again when they're gone in 3 months!

Real cloud hosting involves having an entire infrastructure with REAL Servers (machines) which resources are then virtualized, and you can get a piece of that virtualized dedicated resource for a nice chunk of change. Cloud hosting is one of the most expensive types of hosting because of the maintenance costs it involves. Yes, it's better, but dont get confused between resellers with cloudflare enabled, and REAL Cloud Hosting providers.

9- Protect yourself at all times and ask as many questions about the service as possible.

It is always better to make informed decisions. Do not go in blindly, change your nameservers and hope for the best. Check what is going on in their hosting for sale thread. Don't rely on all positive or all negative feedback, but ask the key questions which you need answered for your specific needs. Any decent hosting company which is offering REAL hosting solutions will not back away from a deal, or at the very least will give you straight answers about your queries.

10- Take a good look at which hosting solutions they have to offer.

Lastly, do not go with hosts who offer only shared hosting. Why? because most likely they are resellers of another host. Go with the real thing, go where your business can grow. There is really no reason beyond not having the technical capabilities to offer certain plans. For example, a reseller will not be able to offer reseller accounts, but they will tell you they will offer it soon, or they dont need to offer it, and they "Specialize" in shared hosting. Fact is, nobody "Specializes" on shared hosting. It is the most basic form of hosting, and the base building block for people to start. If this is all your host can offer, you will soon come to learn you outgrew them.

In conclusion, I hope you find these 10 tips useful when finding a new host at this forum, or any other place for that matter. It is important we stick together and share the knowledge we've acquired over the years. After many years of hosting thousands of domains, we know a thing or two . I appreciate any and all feedback!

If you enjoyed this blog entry, please share it with your friends!

All the best,

Oscar Hernandez

Systems Administrator,
HostTheName.com

225 S. Olive St
Los Angeles, CA 90012
United States of America