Here are a few questions you should ask yourself with regards to choosing a web server hosting provider, and a few cautionary points. Common sense should always prevail in your decisions, but remember that you are not above being sold to. Can you wait three days before making a purchase and maybe do a little more research first?
How many domains are they offering?
This may sound like a silly question to ask, but many hosts will provide more than one domain. For example, they will offer a domain for your blog and then one for your eCommerce website, or one for your eCommerce and a separate domain to handle the shopping cart.
How many email addresses will you get?
Using your email address for business matters is not a good idea, and if you have a popular website, then you are going to have a lot of emails cluttering up your inbox. Numerous email addresses allow you to filter emails from suppliers, commenters, business partners, etc.
Do they offer scripting support?
It is preferable that your host service offers PHP, Java, and CGI. It helps you build pages a little more easily.
Are they going to make you sign up to a service contract?
In many situations, you sign up for hosting services, and then your domain resides on their server(s), but some will ask you to sign up with a new service contract for your domain. If you go for a low price and are puzzled by the contract, then you should have indeed read the small print.
Do people staff the customer service department?
Some hosting services simply cannot afford to have human staff. They will have troubleshooting sections, or a question-answering avatar, or a public forum where others may answer the questions. Some companies have “live chat†support, which seems to be popular at the moment.
How much disk space are you going to get?
This is an obvious question, but the answer is a little clouded. Do you go for a company that offers unlimited disk space? With something like that, there must be a catch right? A classic trick is to give you some for free and then when it comes to upgrading they gouge you mercilessly and make it difficult for you to leave without suffering Google duplication penalties. Ask yourself how much you need, how much you are projected to use, and then give yourself a 10-20% margin for error.
ServerPronto offers the best affordable and secure hosting service in all dedicated server packages.
Photo cred: Flickr /Â Beraldo Leal
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