Welcome back to Part 2 of Web Hosting Fine Print Exposed.
This series of articles reveals 14 fine print web hosting points: things to know and consider when looking for a web host.
We continue with another 4 points:
Web Host Who?
What is the registered business name, address and phone number of the web host?
Why do you want these? Obviously, you want to know who you are going to do business with. If the information is available, good; if not, it is not good.
If the information is available, you may want to verify that it is accurate. It never hurts to be cautious. You may want to get a credit report, although that depends on how important your website is.
The web hosting support system
There are 3 points to discuss here:
1. How many ways are there to access the support department? Instant messaging, email, phone? The more the better, although you’ll probably only need one or two.
Telephone support is excellent; in fact, you can talk to someone. It is better if you are new or have a complex site. Of course, phone support has its own price.
Make sure you know if there are any additional fees for phone support or a limited number of support calls per month.
2. Do you have a forum on the site? Most good web hosts maintain a forum where anyone can post a question. Take a careful look at the forums. How many posts are there? If you find only a few posts, you know that the web server is probably new (although it could also mean that the forum is new – check the dates of the posts).
3. Speed of service. None of the above matters if it takes two days to answer your emails or return your phone calls.
Most web hosts offer 24/7 customer support. Better than this is if the web server guarantees a response within a specific time frame.
Find out this crucial information and write the answers on your evaluation sheet.
Your Neighbors: Adult Sites and Proxies?
Find out if your web host allows adult sites and proxies.
Adult websites. These sites create a particular environment that may not be suitable for other sites. So unless you want to run an adult site, you’re better off finding one that doesn’t offer adult hosting.
proxies. These are small scripts that run on the server that allow other computers to connect to the server and through it to the Internet. From the internet side, it looks as if the server is accessing it and not the computer behind the proxy.
These scripts are a risk to server security and therefore most web hosts have banned them. Again, unless you want to offer a proxy service, you’re better off finding one that doesn’t allow proxies.
Is your web server used for spam?
Check if the web server servers are blacklisted in the spam directory.
You should know all the IP addresses that the web host uses and check each one individually in the spam directory. [http://www.ordb.org/lookup].
By the way, one of the reasons web hosts have banned proxies is out of fear that they will be used for spam. The proxy is used to send spam, the server is blacklisted by IP spam directories.
This creates a lot of headaches for the host and for you. Imagine your emails are no longer being delivered because the recipient’s computers think you are sending spam. Not good.
Web Hosting Uptime Explained
What is uptime?
Uptime refers to how long the server (and your website) keeps running before it needs to be restarted for whatever reason.
What should you keep in mind? Any value greater than 99.5% is good.
Servers need to be rebooted from time to time: this could be part of regular maintenance or in some other unexpected cases.
The bottom line is: downtime happens, the question is how it’s handled. And by that we mean: are you notified of scheduled downtimes and alerted in other instances?
How does the standard 99.5% uptime guarantee translate into hours?
First, multiply the promised uptime percentage by the number of hours in a day to find the amount of uptime per day.
For example, if a provider promises 99.5% uptime
so 99.5 percent = 0.995
0.995 * 24 hours = 23.88 hours
There are 23.88 hours of guaranteed uptime in a 24-hour day or 0.12 hours not guaranteed.
0.12 hours = 7.2 minutes.
0.12*60 minutes = 7.2 minutes
This means that the host guarantees approximately 23 hours and 52 minutes and 48 seconds of service per day.
That means the maximum tolerable downtime in a week is approximately 50 minutes and 24 seconds.
This means that 1.6 days a year are not guaranteed and your website is offline.
I hope these points are useful!
In Parts 3 and 4, we will cover these topics:
- money back guarantee
- Setup Fee Scam
- Help moving your site
- Resource allocation
- Shared against Resellers
- crowded servers
Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
To leave comments and read web hosting reviews based on this article, visit the website of the best web host.
