How Can You Trust A Host?
Posted in Hosting, Web and technology by Khaled on March 29th, 2006
yourself one question “Which hosting company is trustable ?”.To answer this question may be you can look at it in a different way and ask yourself how can I trust a webhost ? what do I look for in host to see if they are trustable or not ?I have been looking for hosts and switching from one another for more than five years, the strategy I came up with is the following:
- I visit their web site see how it looks clean ? tidy ? Professional ? Well yes the look and the design are not too important I guess but it has to be decent not very nice or something that matches my taste or style but just something decent ! it is not very important ! but most of the reputable and honest hosts have clean designs ! if you find a site with a cheap template site that you have seen for a 1000000 times and that costs $5 sorry but the company using it will loose some credibility in my opinion, this is just a point that may add a little something to the overall feel ! that’s all
- I then look to the contact options existing : Phones ? Faxes ? Postal Mail ? Support Desk ? Help/Contact through IM !! Here the most important thing is the phone !
- After that, I read carefully the About section what information they put in there ? are there names ? is it credible ? trustable ? How long have they been in hosting business ? Any information about their servers ? their network ? their datacenters ?
- The next step is to search on google for links to them and reviews about them ! see what people or other sites say about them ? if you don’t find anything or just a little information with this it is not a very goos sign.
- I try to look into their forums (if any) or to ask about them in some big hosting forums
- I gather all what I knew about them Next step is to contact them and this lets me:
- See how long they will take to answer ?
- How is their answer ? are they interested and passionate or just doing this because it is a must ? Are they polite ?
- I ask them some questions:
* How many people work in there ?
* How many in the support crew ? their qualifications ?
* How many Servers ? what Specs ? How old ? where are the datacenters ? the speeds of their Internet backbones ?
* How often do u back up ? How do u back up ?
* What if I needed help at midnight in christmas? is your support really 24/7 ?
* What if I had a script I can’t install would you help ?
* What if I exceeded my Diskspace or Bandwidth ?
* How long will you wait for me if I forgot to pay my bill or was out of town at the payment date ?
* What if I wanted to move to another host ? Can I do it anytime ?
Well, I guess now that you have a good idea about how to proceed to search for a trustable host, this is how I’ve learned to proceed after so many failures in choosing a good host. Good luck !
