How to Choose A Best Web Host? 15 Points Checklist

How Long Have You Been in Hosting Business?

A brand new Internet hosting provider will usually take out banner advertisements and offer outstanding deals/discounts to obtain new customers. Although, the insufficiency of experience and expertise from a new service provider can hurt your personal business as you fight to stay online and keep your website up and running. If you are not able to get a start date through the company’s about us or background, don’t hesitate to contact them and ask them when they started their services.

How Much Experience Does Your Technicians and Staffs Have?

Even if a hosting service provider is new, if the staff members and technicians have been in the hosting & Internet business for a number of years, you can give them one chance. These people may have gathered their expertise through big organization’s IT department. Having this kind of details on hand may help you make an informed judgement about whether they have the required experience to keep your website up and running all the time.

How Are Plan and Package Upgradations Managed?

As your business expands, you may require increasing the size of your hosting package to meet bandwidth and web space demands. Discover how tough it is to upgrade to a large package. Is the procedure trouble-free? If cost is more, will you get some discount since you are already a customer? Also check out whether they will upgrade the hosting package themselves for you or is there something you need to do from your side. At last, ask if they are going to use billing information available in my account or you need to provide it once again. These may look like small factors, but when you are going run a successful business, every small fact that they can help you with is time saved that you can concentrates on other important things.

Are There Any Setup Installation Charges?

Find out are there any installation charges to move to the new hosting company. A cost of 10 to 40 dollar or INR for installation is not uncommon of, but there are few outstanding hosting service providers that don’t charge any installation fee. If a host does charge installation fee and you don’t want to pay it, tell them directly you are considering another hosts and reconfirm if they would be ready to refuse the fee if you opt them. It never wrong to ask as long as you are well mannered and well behaved.

Is the Technical Support Staff Available 24*7?

Many web hosting providers will state they are available 24*7, but this is not always the true. One of the worst points is to have a web page that is down and stop running on a Friday mid-night and not get a reply until Monday morning. It means two complete days of lost traffic and visitors to your site, also it will affect your brand reputation. Verify if the support team is in reality there for you around the clock (24/7/365) by asking mentioned questions.

How Do You Manage Website Security?

Before signing up with any host you need to understand fundamental security terms, i.e SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and Firewalls to assure they have some protections and securities in place. Although, you should also investigate about the backend of your website. Will other sites hosted on your web server have access to your data or files at any point? And how will that host guarantee they don’t?

How Many Users Are on Each Web Server?

Large number of users using single server can cause your website downtime and you site will run slow. Collecting information about how large the each server is and how many customers are on it can help you out in comparing different hosting providers. Select the one that has the minimal number of users each server.

How Frequently Is My Website Backed Up?

Try to find a hosting company that backs up the website at least once in a day. Don’t forget to inquire about where backups are kept and whether you have the permission to access them with the help of your cPanel.

Do You Provide Referral Bonuses?

If you are happy with your web hosting provider, you will love to tell your network. You might as well get a referral bonus/commission for new customer you will refer to them. Many hosts offer this via an affiliate or refer & earn program.

What Is Your Monthly Uptime Guarantee?

Uptime is very important thing for a website, but you want a statistic for a complete month to check what the uptime really is. Look for a 99.8% or higher uptime (Our website UpdatedReviews is hosted on a 99.9% up server).

Do You Offer a Money-Back Guarantee?

What if you move your websites, spend all valuable time and energy and are not happy with the service? Will they give a refund of your hosting charges you have paid so you can take your hard-earned money and move to some other host? Few web hosting companies like A2Hosting, BlueHost & iPage offer anytime money back guarantee.

How Do You Manage Website Downtime?

If you have a guarantee of 100% uptime and your web page is only up 94% of the time that particular month, how does the web host manage it? Are you given any partial refund of your monthly fee or credit?

Is There Any Penalty for Cancellation?

If you decide to leave current host at some point of time, you do not want to waste more money on cancellation charges or lose money you have already given to the host. Ask how they are going to manage account cancellations and if there is a minimum portion of time you are tied to the agreement before you can shift to some other host.

What Makes You the Best Option?

What is extraordinary and special thing about their hosting service? They must have a clear cut purpose why you should use the services of them. This could be outstanding customer support, extremely high uptime records, features and pricing or even that they need your business and going to give you a rebate to take it. Ask and see what types of interesting responses you get.

Selecting a Best web hosting company is not an easiest move, but if you ask the appropriate questions, it can be little less difficult of an experience.

Also Check the list of Top 10 Web Hosting Companies.