What to look for in a paid host ?

abelarno · Joined: 02 Jun 2008 Posts: 6

Nothing comes for free and sooner you realise it better it is.
We are in year 2008 and things cost money, so if you expect something you pay for it in one way or another. You get what you pay for. Go for cheap and you end up cheap.

Now here we discuss what we have to cautious off and what we need to be sure of before sticking with some host.

I'll restrict this one to paid webhosts.

okay, seems you have decide to hunt for a good paid webhost.

You use mother of all searches, google and find long list of sites boasting of paid hosting and attractive plans and you manage to signup for one of those offering you great Unlimited features with healthy space and bandwidth. WOW! in an hour you got paid host. You da man! Really ?

Naah, seems like you did not do your homework and unless you are lucky, you have invited trouble for yourself.

I am not going to say for or against any but here is what you look for in sequence before deciding on any host.
Many things overlap in searches for free or paid host.

1) Reseller/Dedicated
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First and foremost check out what type of hosting do they have, what type of servers do they have ? Are they themselves on resellers or have dedicated servers ?

Reselers are smaller and make them dependent on server provider for support.

Dedicated are costly and give them free hand to control servers.

Dual Xeon dedicated server which is good one usually comes as 80Gb with 1200Gb. or similar, and its close to $200-300/month. Now if someone boasts of providing you 100Gb bandwidth and 10 Gb space, be sure hes either overselling it (because that way he can only cater to 8 people, unless he spends additional 50-100$ for harddisk ,so cost increases from 250 -400 then per month) or hes fooling around by assuming no one will use 10gb space and he can have many there, but also with 100Gb bandwidth he can have no more than 10 people, with 50Gb bandwidth per month not more than 20 people.
When someone is spending close to 400$/month on dedicated, he would like to have much much more than 20 people, so that at time of sale he has good database(memberbase-hosted) to sell.

You may fall in for cheap ones but fact may be they are on resellers and themselves helpless, so they need support more than you need it from them.

Thing is when you are spending for it, you expect to get good treatment and hassle free hosting. You want to spend time on your other stuff, than to worry about your host going down every now and then. So, find out what they really are using - reseller or dedicated and if they are overselling or not ?

2) How long in business
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People can get cheap $25 resellers and start offering packages for $2 a month or simialr and with 13 people hosted their cost is recovered. But would you like to stick with such hosts ?
Most newcomers are doing this, older horses have mostly assessed their needs, so go fordedicated at tiems but still duratino of business also exemplifies their reliability and legitimacy and claims.

3) Website and details provided
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Many forums have posts like if you need hosting PM me, and no site links are given or they give excuses like site is under construction and related.
These are the ones to save yourself from.
You expect a good host to have a decent website, not really that flashy or big one, a simple one where it expresses all its policies and trends.
So, see if they have website and if yes, how detailed or informative it is ?
Do they mention their TOS (Terms Of Services),Policies, Plans, Support methods, and contact details of owner atleast ?
If the site throws 404 or shows under construction, get it straight. People who don't have time to support themselves and their sites care for supporting you the least. A simple decent website that is informative, is a step forward to look into other features and assets.
In paid hosts, its especially necessary to find what are their support mechanism and also traceable and reachable contact details.

4) SUPPORT
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How decent and supportive your host is ?
You are spending on it and obviously you will expect speedy support and solution of your problems, but if your host has no such arrangements, you know how to run away.
Most nowadays offer HelpCentreLive or simialr or e-support thru kayanko but thing is how efficient are their support providers and how effective is their help. If a bunch of kids join hands and try to solve your problems, may GOD have mercy on you and your business prospects.

5) TOS and Refunds
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Never ever miss out on TOS and also check refund policy or moneyback stuff. Most won't but if they do, then how much they deduct and all.

6) Features
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Hey that host says Unlimited sqls,addons and related.
What will you do when a lion comes in front of you ? You'll run to save your life. Whenever you see word unlimited, with regards to features ( i mean sqls,addons, parked and related) run away to save your a**.
Its a literally lifeless host which claims to provide unlimited stuff.
There is nothing called Unlimited.
There is always a limit, though it may be that high for most users to ever reach but limit is there. Its again attractive ploy by many, to get more people hosted and grow their hosting and then sell for higher price.
Also, people distribute say 100 sqls and more. Well you install a forum, a blog, a oscommerce script, a guestbook, a form generator, a wiki,a gallery, one or two other things besides your site or CMS.At most you consume 10 sqls and even that is too much, you don't need that many unless you are big site desinger king or something. So, what do kids do with those extra sqls. They will play and test their scripts, scripts like mail bombing and proxy etc. etc. and this will load up system respources and consume too much to mke server skow , slow and finally downtime untill server team reboots and suspends culprit.
It again brings to point no.1 ,if they are on dedicated server, they have all controls and they can reboot as and when they find and also punish culprit but if they are on reseller which usually have limits in space and bandwidth, they are entirely dependent on server team to do the job.

CPanel and related all come for cost and same thing, if they are giving you that free, they will either expect you to have adsense or generate them revenues in other ways like posting in forums, so they have high traffic forum and their domain;s worth also rises and they can fetch money or more adrevenues to cut down costs.

In nutshell, features are not the first thing to consider, but one of the things for sure.

I hope this long article will help few atleast to decide and stick with better hosts.

Last thing you want is looking for new host every month or loosing site frequently, besides payment and server switches. Every big downtime costs you visitors and members and surely you wouldn't like to suffer that thru someone new with reseller and unlimited stuff.

bizzyx33 · Joined: 24 Jul 2008 Posts: 10

You also have to make sure the hosting service has good uptime. There are a lot of host out there who have really bad uptime. You don't want your site to be down during peak hour for your site.