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How to Select a GOOD Hosting Company?

Added by Kevin B on Mon, Feb 02, 2009, 11:35 PM

What are the factors you want to consider

when selecting a hosting company for your web presence besides storage space and bandwidth?

The first question

 that should come to your mind is: What is your goal? Why do you want to deal with a hosting company in the first place? Well, most likely you want to have a website.

The next question you want to ask from yourself:

What is the web site for? Why should I have a web site in the first place? Well, if you are a reasonable business person, you probably would answer this: "because I want to make money!". Meaning, the money you get out of the website (your on-line revenue) has to be higher than ALL of your expenses related to that website to make a profit. We are pretty sure that all this makes sense.

What are the related expenses?

• Domain registration fee
• Hosting fees
• Website maintenance
• Website marketing fees
• and possible related taxes.

You add up all these expenses and subtract it from the revenue that your website generated and you can find out your profit and calculate your ROI (return on investment) easily. Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn't it?

One thing that we point out here:

even though, most hosting companies normally do not charge you separate maintenance and marketing fees for your website with their hosting package, they do offer these services on a limited basis for pretty high prices.

It is also important to note,

that your website will not be noticed at all without using these services. There are just way too many websites out there. So you can use the hosting company's overpriced services, try do it yourself (as we mentioned in our previous article high quality maintenance and marketing requires a lot of time) or hire a professional consulting company who specializes in these services and has a full time team of experts who assist you every step of the way. Now back to selecting a good hosting company.

Let's talk about finding the best value for the dollars

A good hosting company would keep your server space costs low and will not gauge you on the bandwidth fees. That is the bare minimum. They usually give you numbers in gigabytes (1,000 megabytes) for server space. 1 megabyte usually equals to one minute of music on your mp3 player.

To be able to compare two rivaling hosting companies

for your business, you want to measure the price they charge for the same service. You want to find out how much they charge for each megabyte of storage space. You also want to find out how much they charge for each megabyte of transferred data.

Determining these numbers are a good starting point,

but you should not base your decision on these numbers alone. The speed of the connection to the main arteries of the Internet is very important. In fact, it is much more important than the storage space (server space) or bandwidth they provide.

Did you know?

that a first time visitor to your website will give you only 15 seconds to let him/her know what you offer? If your website is hosted on a slow server, there is a good chance that it would take almost 15 seconds (or even more) for your website just to load!

If your visitor thinks that your website is too slow,

then he/she would think that you do not have the money for a faster server, so he/she would think that you are a small, fly-by-night company who just want to take his/her money and run.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of scammers out there who would do that and a lot of people already got burnt, so it is very difficult for a company with new on-line presence to build trust, unless they look WAY MUCH BIGGER than they actually are. To achieve this goal,

your company must have a fast server.

A good hosting company will have no problem disclosing their connection speed. They are actually proud of it. However, if you see that they are beating around the bush when it comes to disclosing their connection speed, then you probably are dealing with a less than an honest hosting company. The reason why most hosting companies do not like to disclose their server speed is because they use a technique called shared hosting.

This means that they host several hundred or even a thousand websites on the same server under a plan called 'shared hosting'.

What does shared hosting actually mean?

It means you not only share the same server with hundreds or even thousands of other web sites on the same remote computer (thus sharing its hard drive, CPU and memory), but you also share the connection. There is usually not a problem with this setup as most servers are using state-of-the-art technology and ultra fast, high performance operating systems to run the web sites. You know,

your web site is basically nothing else,

but a bunch of files sitting in a folder on the remote computer. The problem starts when one website in your website's 'neighborhood' gets a lot of visitors, in other words, its traffic increases. This can cause a major problem for not only you, but all the websites residing on the same server or, as a matter of fact, on the same server branch. Why? The server where your website sits on in a certain folder belongs to a so-called

server branch.

A branch is actually a set of servers that usually placed on top of each other on racks in a remote building and they are all directly interconnected with a high speed fiber optic cable. Many of these branches and these cables are eventually get connected to a main cable that is connected to the outside world.

In other words:

the main connection to the outside world is branched out to groups of servers inside the building.

If your website is located on a a certain server that belongs to a branch that is connected to another server that hosts (has) a web site with very high traffic, your website (along with the rest of the websites on the same branch) can suffer a significant speed decrease affecting YOUR website's speed, thus your bottom line.

So if you think about having a website that actually makes you money, you definitely want to consider the connection speed that the hosting company can offer.

There is one more thing that is even more important for your website's visitors than speed: that is

reliability and security.

Let's talk about reliability first. We just finished talking about this remote building somewhere that has basically nothing else in it, but a bunch of computers neatly arranged on racks (called the server farm) and tons of wires that connects them, plus a few computer technicians who supervise the flawless operation.

You cannot really judge how big a hosting company really is

by just looking at their website. It could be two guys in a basement with a few computers networked together running some version of Linux. Or it could be a big corporation with multiple high security buildings or server farms in multiple locations. Which one would you choose? We think the answer id pretty obvious.

However,

they both can produce very appealing websites and many times you cannot judge from their website how big they are.

Remember when we told you to make your website in a way so your company would look big to build on-line trust?

Our advice. Call them and find out if they have a server farm.

If they do not, then run to the other direction.

Normally, more serious hosting companies employ armed security personnel and 24 hour surveillance cameras on site (in their secure building) to prevent unauthorized intrusion. Also,

the most reliable hosting companies

have multiple server farms in different states. They usually select states that are not prone to natural disaster such as a hurricane, tornado or earthquake. The visitors of your website do not know and do not care how reliable the operation of your hosting company is because everything takes place in the background that they do not even notice when everything goes smoothly.

However, they usually become very well aware

of the lack of speed or the lack of the website itself when something went wrong. And many times even a small flaw that lasts only for a few hours can cost you your whole on-line business. It can certainly cost you almost a half a year of hard work; all that time that you took to develop on-line trust.

Hosting companies are very well aware of this and most of them pay very careful attention to the so-called uptime (meaning the hosted website is accessible by your visitors). Nowadays the industry standard for uptime is more than 99% but it canot reach 100%.

Anybody who promises 100% uptime should be handled with care.

Why? Because not even the best combination of all the previously mentioned and most carefully planned and executed measures can prevent machine malfunction. The hosting company needs to be prepared for that by providing adequate backup, in other words, redundancy. Not only the data need to be redundant on their servers though, but their connections to the outside world too. Now there is always a chance (even a slim one) all participants in a redundant server or connection go down at the same time, there is still a chance. We think, overly exaggerated claims can be a sales technique, that can often backfire.

Most reputable hosting companies usually promise you 99.9% uptime.

With discussing redundancy we arrived at the very sensitive topic of security. On-line attacks on hosting companies are relentless, vicious and sometimes successful and can be very damaging at times if they are not well prepared for them. That is why they have to have state of the art security software and qualified security experts in their team to make sure that they can always address any on-line security issues in a timely fashion (usually within minutes). Not only they should be able to provide security for their own servers, but they should provide security for the participating websites. Think about this way: the visitors of your website expect their data to be treated with the utmost care. Thus providing security to them on secured web pages protected by a security certificate on you site is absolutely necessary to build on-line trust.

Good hosting companies sell their own security certificates for a nominal fee

above their normal hosting fee or they can actually include them in their hosting package.

Let's recoup

 We talked about

• domain name registration
• server space
• bandwidth
• speed
• reliability
• and security

so far as being the determining factors in your selection of a good hosting company. 

Last, but not least, let's talk about Customer Service here a little bit. We capitalized these two words because we think it is absolutely necessary to always be the best in that field to keep existing customers as they are the bread and butter of any company.

This statement applies to a hosting company even more because the selection is wide (there are thousands of hosting companies out there). Try to give them a test call and see how long you have to wait to get connected.

You may be surprised to find out that a really super fast, professionally looking website, rock bottom prices and ease of use covers up a customer service nightmare when you actually have to speak with a live person at a hosting company.

You always want to ask this question:

Do the customer service representatives at your selected hosting company communicate in English well enough to be able to understand your problem and explain the solution? If they do not, we suggest you should move on and go with someone else even when they cost a little more.

Better hosting companies now provide a 30 day money back guarantee. This way you can have a chance to speak with their Customer Service as a real customer, not to some professional salespeople who paint the company all rosy when they try to lure you in.

As you can see, selecting a good hosting company is no easy task.

We provided this article to assist you in making an informed decision when it comes to the often overly mystified realm of computers and the World Wide Web.

We strongly believe that you as a consumer have the basic right to make informed decisions.

That is why we developed our newsletter. We inform people like you about computers, the Internet and provide you with a lot of useful, insider information.

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