7 Questions to Answer Before you Sign up for Hosting
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Over the years I’ve had every conceivable positive and negative experience with web hosting services and I’ve learned what questions to ask to attempt to minimize the risk of more disasters.
I have learned to interrogate possible hosts with my essential questions before I sign up.
The answers they provide not only give you valuable information to help you make your decision, but you’ll also learn a lot about the speed and quality of the company’s response to customer enquiries, which is one of the most important factors in becoming a happy web hosting client.
Let’s face it, searching on the web you can find people who love and hate almost any hosting provider, so you have to learn to evaluate them on your own. Here’s my tips that I’ve used to find the 5 great hosting providers that I currently use.
Pre-Sales Questions for Your Hosting Company
1.) What is Your Backup System?
Ask about what is backed up: you want to hear that all files and databases are backed up, not just files or just databases.
The next question is the frequency of the backups. Daily is best, weekly may be acceptable if you don’t update you site too often. Some companies will even offer real time backups, which is mandatory on a site where you are getting a lot of user generated content.
Where are the backups located? Off-site backups are best. If the hosting company burns down, having your backups sitting next to the main server is not going to help you get your site back online.
2.) Where is Your Data Center Located?
I personally avoid hosting with companies that have their datacenter in areas that are subject to extremes of weather or are politically unstable. Look closely to find this info, since a company can have its offices in a different location than its datacenter. Call and ask if you are unable to find the datacenter location on the website.
3.) Do They offer Phone Support?
Is there a support phone number on the website? If not, find another web hosting service. If there is, call the number and ask a couple routine questions from this list. If you get an answering machine and are told to leave your information, imagine what it would be like if your site was making $100 an hour and you were making this call, would you be okay with being put on hold or told to leave a message?
4.) Where are the Testimonials?
Can you find the name and websites of other sites that host with this company? Do a search on Google for the “web hosting company name” testimonial to see what others have said. Keep in mind that you you’ll likely find negative customers for the best hosting service on the web, so look for patterns rather than specifics.
Email or use the “contact us” form for a couple of the sites that have given testimonials and get more information. A tip: ask them “what do you like least about XYZ hosting?” If it is something small, then fine, if it is something serious, steer clear.
5.) How Fast Are the Servers?
Visit as many sites as possible from their testimonial list and see how fast they load. Then go to Internet Supervision and lookup some of these sites for their load times from various locations worldwide.
Compare the results with a site that you know is fast, like Yahoo.com for example. You can also compare with your current provider if you are thinking of moving your hosting company. Also note, you may want to try this at a few different times of the day, to minimize the possibility that you would base your evaluation on a momentary glitch.
6.) Patch & Update Management?
How current are their software installations? What version of PHP are they using? Find out and then go to php.net and check the current stable version. If the web hosting service has Fantastico then see what version of WordPress and other apps they are installing. Compare that to the Fantastico website to find out how current they are.
Since WordPress updates regularly it is a good measure of how well the hosting company stays on top of their patching regime.
7.) Who Are You In Bed With?
Go to Whois.sc and look up a site that is hosted with the company you are considering, from the testimonials in step 4 above (the link provided shows my site). Scroll down to where it says “Reverse IP:” and find out how many other sites are on the same server. For mine the number is 18 which is very reasonable, I’ve seen over 200 for a shared hosting company.
Click the “Reverse IP:” link and find a partial list of what other sites are on the server, or you can grab a trial membership to get the full list. Visit a few of these sites, if they are porn or shady in any way, pick a different hosting company!
Don’t be A Hosting Crash Test Dummy! Ask Before you Sign up.
That concludes my list of tips to save you from potential hosting disasters. Currently Art of Money is hosted with Dreamhost, who I am very happy with. I have my blog network on Hostgator who I also recommend highly. If you want to sign up at either of these companies you can use the coupon “Jigsaw” which is my company name, to save a few bucks.
(Bonus tip: once you start having a bunch of sites and you start making money, diversify and get several hosting accounts, so that at most only a percentage of your business can be down at one time.)
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Comments ( 10 )
Richard added these pithy words on Jun 07 07 at 7:29 amIf they offer domain registering, find out if they are a true registrar or a reseller. If they are a reseller find out how much support they provide. My host is a reseller and have several domains through them. However support is greatly lacking for domains.
Recently I almost had to refund a domain sale because of the lack of support. Going forward I plan to use one of the big registrars, godaddy, snapnames, etc.
Jon added these pithy words on Jun 07 07 at 8:08 amHi Richard, I didn’t mention it in here because the topic is hosting but my policy is to NEVER have my domains registered at the same place as my sites are hosted. Always use specialists for each service. Maybe I’ll write another post for why having them at the same place is a really bad idea.
K added these pithy words on Jun 07 07 at 9:31 amInteresting…
Why would porn sites be a bad indicator?
Aren’t they usually big $’s
and high traffic?
Tyler added these pithy words on Jun 07 07 at 9:46 amHey!
Just as a note to this post, I signed on with Host Gator through Jon and have been very happy so far. However, I don’t move a terabyte! (Yet :))
Jon added these pithy words on Jun 07 07 at 10:03 am@K, big traffic is a problem if the site is on the same server as you…they will hog server resources (on a basic hosting account if one site slows down the computer all the sites suffer.) Also, it is the bad neighbor effect for search rankings. I have a hunch that Google watches these kind of things and I wouldn’t want any of my sites having any kind of “adult or bad content” filters applied to them due to them sitting on a server full of adult or illicit content.
@Tyler…thanks man. You paid my Starbucks bill for a week
Tyler added these pithy words on Jun 08 07 at 10:35 amThought I’d toss a link regarding Dreamhost in here from Robert Scoble.
http://scobleizer.com/2007/06/07/dreamhost-sucky/
Take it for what it’s worth…I’m no hosting expert.
Jon added these pithy words on Jun 08 07 at 10:50 amThat’s a really stupid winy post by Scoble.
1.) If his friends presentation was important, then he should have had it on disc or some other backup.
2.) If you change web hosts every time you site has an outage, you’ll never do well in business.
Go back in 6 months and all those people in the comments who say they hate Dreamhost and love ABC host, will now be bitching about ABC host and telling you they love some other company.
Tyler added these pithy words on Jun 08 07 at 12:58 pmJon,
It was a very cry-baby post and you make 2 very key points.
But, it does illustrate what I think is a point worth mentioning. That is, popular bloggers can have a certain influence with their posts that they may or may not realize.
Scoble and other bloggers, such as Shoemoney etc., may post “rants” about something that they don’t like and those posts can have a profound effect on the many who look to them for insight.
It is up to us as readers to filter out the worthy information…bringing up the point of disclosure.
That we will leave for anther time.
Jon added these pithy words on Jun 08 07 at 2:08 pmI agree with the influence point, I think that’s why the post annoyed me; there was so little foundation for something that could hurt a business. Dreamhost is far from perfect, but they are an employee owned company and I find they are very sincere in trying to bring great quality hosting to people at a very decent price.
Derrick added these pithy words on Jun 13 07 at 3:18 pmOne thing I always look out for is pricing based on a lock-in period. Hostgator signs you up on a month-to-month basis; many hosts only give you the low advertised price for a 12 or 24 month contract, paid in advance.