Picking A Good Web Host

Before I found my current host (who is great, by the way), I had the misfortune of using the services of some horrible companies. Fortunately, none of them stole money from me, but their services must have been run by 5 year olds. Because of my rather dismal experiences with previous hosts, I have figured out the secrets to finding a reliable web hosting company.

Customer Service

You should check around the Internet to see if your host offers good customer service. Never believe the host’s claims. You should look for 24/7 support, chat and ticket support, as well as phone support. If anything goes wrong, you must be able to contact them right away.

If you see a lot of people saying, “They never respond to their e-mails”, then it is probably a bad host. Good hosts should respond to any support inquires within minutes, not hours.

Uptime

Get a host with reliable uptime. Do not ever believe the 99.9% uptime guarantees that so many hosts use. And also, do not believe them if they say “we will refund you if your uptime is less than 99.9%.” Very few hosts will ever live up to their promises.

My last host promised that. I had 80% uptime one month, which meant it was down 20% of the time. I told them to refund me, but they didn’t. I kept on yelling at them via e-mail, warning them I would go public with every single chat transcript between us. They finally refunded my money.

Resource Usage

Before you sign up with a host, make sure you read over their Terms of Service and understand the resource usage limits. Some hosts will say “you can’t use more than X at any given time” but others will say “you can’t use more than X for X seconds”. If you have any questions, contact the hosting company and make sure you save any chat transcripts you have with them.

Note: If you get a dedicated server there should be no CPU/Memory resource usage limits, since you are the only user of that server.

Bandwidth

Most hosts oversell their services, which means they offer you more than they have to give. Bandwidth is usually the main selling point for hosts.

Most hosts these days offer at least 25 GB of bandwidth per month, which means you cannot transfer more than that amount per month. However, most users will never reach their bandwidth limits due resource usage limits. If you have a site that is using a gigabyte per day of bandwidth you should have a dedicated server anyways.

Try to stay away from outrageous claims like “unlimited bandwidth.” If it is too good to be true, it is probably a scam.

Database Software & Web Server Plugins

If you are going to be running blog software, make sure your host offers MySQL and PHP. The majority of hosts have those features. Also, check the versions of their extra goodies to make sure they are all fairly up to date.

Disk Space

You should try and get a host that offers more than enough disk space. More importantly, you should see if they have separate limits for MySQL disk space, or if it is calculated in with everything else.

Just like with bandwidth, if they offer “unlimited disk space”, stay away.

Operating System

A lot of scripts will not work on anything other than Linux/Unix style systems, so make sure you check before you sign up. As far as security goes, both Windows and Linux/Unix (including Mac OS X) servers include security holes, there just isn’t any way to avoid it.

DoS Protection

Denial of Service attacks are perhaps the most common form of attacks against web servers. Basically the hacker will send a large amount of requests in a short period of time, which will force the server to die. Another common form is when hackers trick the server into sending data to a nonexistent IP address, which can cause infinite loops.

Always check to make sure the host is protected from these sorts of attacks.

Control Panel Software

The control panel software is where you configure your web site, like adding e-mail accounts and checking the server logs. I am a big fan of “CPanel”, but many hosts offer other solutions.

Most hosts offer demos of their control panel software, so make sure you take a look. If it is really confusing, slow, or if it looks like it was made by a 5 year old, you may want to look for another host.

Ready To Use Scripts

Generally, good hosts have a large assortment of “ready to use” scripts, such as forums, content management systems (including blog software), and even chat rooms. Although this isn’t that important, it is handy being able to click a button and have a script installed automatically.

Domains

A big reason I love my current host is their support for unlimited add-on domains, even on their shared servers. This lets me host my other sites on the same server for the same monthly price as one domain.

If a host forces you to transfer your domain name(s) to them, stay far, far away. Hosts that do that will take control of your domain and could hold it “hostage” if your relations deteriorate. I’ve heard about some pretty nasty cases of that happening.

Doing The Research

I would highly recommend visiting sites like Web Hosting Jury, which post user reviews of web hosts. You should not pay attention to “good” reviews, instead you should check for horror stories. If a host has been around for a while and no one is complaining about them, then it is a good host.

Some sites let the web host respond to user reviews as well. You should always pay attention to their comments. If they seem to be making up excuse after excuse, I would avoid them.

Also, Google is a great way to find bad hosts. Just type in the hosts name, then “sucks”, and take a look at the first 30 or so results.

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