There are literally thousands of hosting companies that are available for you to choose from, so how do you go about picking the one that’s right for you? Obviously you can look for hosting reviews by other people but these are often biased towards the company, but the best way is to email them and ask some specific questions.
Here are the 4 most important questions you should ask a hosting company before you purchase their services:
1. Do you take regular off-site backups?
This is important because even if a hosting company claims to make backups, often they just backup the files to the same hard drive – not very useful if the server suffers from a catastrophic hard drive failure which happens occasionally. By taking an off-site backup you know that your site will always be available if something should happen to the server you are on. Also find out how often the backups are because if they are just once a month you could still stand to lose 30 days worth of data.
2. Do you have an uptime guarantee SLA?
Many webhosts will offer a 99% uptime guarantee, but they don’t say what happens if they don’t meet that guarantee or how it is defined. You need to ask for a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which details how they define uptime and what they will do if they do not meet their guarantee. For example, it’s not uncommon for a web host to state that downtime caused by a datacenter problem does not fall under the guarantee because it’s outside their control. If the web hosting company can’t produce an uptime SLA, look for a different host!
3. How many hosting accounts do you allow per server?
A server with a good specification will cost a hosting company around $300 per month to lease from a datacenter. If they are offering hosting accounts for $5 then they need at least 60 customers on the server to break even. If each of those customers had a total of 10 websites that’s 600 sites on the server. You can see that the server can quickly become overcrowded and in web hosting terms is referred to as ‘oversold’. If a company refuses to tell you how many accounts it allows per server then look for a more open and honest hosting company.
4. What is your refund policy?
Many web hosting companies try to lock you in for 2 or more years by offering lower monthly rates if you prepay. You might be asked to pay $125 upfront for the best deal which gives you 3 years of hosting. However, what if the service deteriorates after 12 months? Are you able to get your money back from the 2 years that you have remaining?
There are many other important questions you should find answers to, such as what happens if you exceed your monthly quota limits, how many inodes you are allowed, how many CPU cycles you are allowed, how many mySQL connections you are allowed, are there any email sending limits – but these are more technical and beyond what most people need to know.