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Web Hosting Articles >> Low cost hosting... value or trouble? Looking for web hosting? Then join the thousands of people everyday who are either looking for their first web hosting provider, or someone jilted by a previous host. In your search for web hosting you may see many offers for $5/year hosting, or 10 Gigs of space and 100 Gigs of transfer a month for $2. Should you fork over your hard earned money for this type of offer? It sounds great, but, as always, you should research before you buy. A hosting company is running a business just like McDonalds down the street. In order for a hosting company to stay in business they have to provide quality, service, and reliability. Those three things are not inexpensive to provide, actually, they can be quite costly for a business. You want to make sure that the hosting company you are interested in has enough business wherewithal to survive long term. There are a lot of fly by night host, who are here one day and gone the next without even a warning. As always, as an informed consumer, you want to keep your wits about you. Here are some tips to help you find out if the host you are considering is a deal, or bust. See what type of contact information your host provides, and then send email to one or all departments, at different times, and see how fast and knowledgeable their response is this will give you a gauge of the company's ability to service you. If they have a phone number, see what hours they have listed, and call various times during these hours to see if someone answers your call or you constantly get voicemail. Also, see if they have any websites hosted that they have listed for a reference, if so, check on it. Sometimes web host have their sites hosted on a dedicated server, so when you go there it is always quick and responsive, you want to see how sites are doing on their shared server(s). Visit those sites see how fast and responsive, or slow they come up. This will give you a good ideal of the server speed where they may place your site. Ask the company if Do a WHOIS lookup goto http://www.whois.net and run a whois on the company's URL, see what comes back, check the information, if it does not show that is not important. During the WHOIS check see when the domain name was registered; if it was registered within the last month ask them why? It does not necessarily mean they are a new host; they could've changed names recently. Finally, check Google, or another search engine, and type in the name of the hosting company. View the first 5-10 pages of the returned results see if they are comments from other people, or other sites that have done a review on the company. You will be surprised at the content you can get from a search engine...try typing in your name and see what is returned maybe a blast from the past. Now that you have gathered information about your prospective host what next? Look over the information you have gathered, and use your "guts". How did you feel about the answers you received? Was the answer short, ambiguous, or quick? Or, was it professional, knowledgeable, and courteous? What was the average response time? All in all if you feel good about the host, go with your guts. Just because a host is low cost does not mean they are inferior, they may have a different business model. But, remember, if it looks to good to be true, it usually is! More Articles... |
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