Some webmasters choose a web hosting company mostly on the basis of price. Even if you are on a tight budget, the costs of the hosting plan should not be a major deciding factor. There are four issues you need to investigate with a new web hosting company, whether you’re just starting off or you’re switching to new hosting.
1. Fast and Friendly Customer Support
The hosting company can promise 99.9 percent uptime, but there’s still that tiny little percent left that can throw a spanner in your works. There’s no such thing as a 100 percent guarantee in web hosting uptime. When problems arise, you need to be able to contact the company’s customer support as soon as possible.
You should be able to reach the hosting company at any time of the day or week. That metaphorical spanner won’t take the weekends off, so neither should technical support. Both phone and e-mail support should be available, if either of those mediums are unavailable, it’s time to find a new IT Support Canterbury.
Another alarming sign to look out for: technical support taking too long to respond. You may have heard of some horror stories where an unfortunate webmaster had to wait several days just to get one simple answer out of the support team. Truth be told, a waiting period of more than two hours is absurd. The ideal waiting time is approximately 30 minutes or less.
Before you sign up to a hosting company, you also need to know if their service is friendly. Generally speaking, if they’re rude to you before you hand over the money, they’ll be just as bad afterward. Besides, technical difficulties are already stressful enough — impolite tech support will only exacerbate the problem.
2. Backup Data
It is imperative to regularly make backups for your site. Nevertheless not everyone wants to make backups day after day. One backup per week is just fine for most webmasters. What happens, however, when your site goes haywire and the last backup was made four days ago?
The lesson here is to not put all of the pressure on yourself. The hosting company should create daily site backups for you. Prior to signing up to their hosting service, inquire about how the company backs up site data.
Power outages should be handled by using an alternative source of energy.
Their own computers can go kaput. The hosting company should have spare hardware so they can quickly put themselves back into business.
If they don’t make backups on a daily basis, then don’t even bother with such a hosting plan.
3 Appropriate Pricing
For chosen Services, don’t pay for more than what you need. If you only want a personal blog, for example, would you really need 50 gigabytes of online storage space and 100 terabytes of bandwidth? Of course not —but if your intention was to have a high-trafficked commercial site, you may want to reconsider.
An e-commerce site will need all of the standard features, such as a FTP management system, cPanel and a professional-looking shopping cart. Not all of the bells and whistles will be needed, so calculate what is necessary for your site.
