Tips For Web Hosting Shopping

If you're looking to make a serious purchase, it's usually a good idea to shop around.  Web hosting is no different.  Follow these tips to make shopping around for a web host easier and more successful.

Tips to buy the best hosting

1. Know what you're looking for.  Once you're clear in your own mind about what your website is designed to do, your choice of web host becomes much easier.  A personal or hobby website will have different hosting requirements to a commercial or business website.  Make a list of your requirements before you start shopping around.

2. Look at the levels of technical and customer support on offer.  Is it an email support ticket system, a 24 hour hotline, or an emergency help desk?  Ideally, you want to be able to speak to a real person at any time of the day or night should problems arise.

3.  What sort of back up arrangements are in place?  Find out what arrangements the hosting company has for storing and retrieving your data.  Remember that it's also your responsibility to back up your own data.

4. Check out the hosting company's contingency plans.  Occasionally, things go wrong that our outside our control, such as server breakdown or power failure.  Whether or not things go wrong isn't the issue.  The issue is how quickly they can be put right.  A good web host will have planned for these worst case scenarious and put contingency plans in place.  Do they have emergency generators to cope with power failure, for example?

5. Look at your web host's anti-spam policy.  If you end up with a web host with a reputation for spamming, you could lay yourself open to a whole lot of hassle and inconvenience.  So make sure they have an anti-spam policy in place, and check that it's rigorously enforced.

6. Does the web host accept payment through Paypal?  This is often a safer option than credit card payments, because it can be instantly terminated in the event of a dispute.  A dishonest web host may continue to charge you through your credit card, even after you've cancelled the contract.

7. Avoid web hosts with a reputation for overselling.  This is becoming a widespread practice, as web hosts know that most users don't use their full alllocation of disk space.  However, if the host has sold more disk space than it actually has available, there's a very real risk of your website crashing should people start to take up their full allowance.

Above all, dig around discussion forums and comments to get a feel for the different web hosts that you're considering.  This will provide a much better guide than a straightforward price comparison.  When it comes to web hosting, you're looking for value, not price.