Nearly all web hosts will advertise and guarantee a “99.9%” or higher uptime percentage. However, these guarantees are about as trustworthy as a used car salesman, not very! If a host has a history of a great uptime performance they will post a history of their uptime performance, monitored by a 3rd party, such as Alertra or InternetSeer.

Additionally, web hosts that operates on a redundant network (more than one data line to the internet) will be more reliable than a web host that is running only a single data line.

Case study 1- Bad host will charge your credit card without your permission!

There are possibilities that you could receive a mail like the following from your hosting company any morning

‘Dear Mr. xxx, Congratulation! As per our previous notices, we have upgraded your hosting account for [website address] today to our new [plan] and processed your invoice [invoice id] in the amount of $39.95 through your credit card account on file.’

Where, you did not ask them to upgrade nor authorize them to charge without your consent.

Case study 2- Bad host will steal your money again and again!

They won’t reply any support mail. They charged you twice the money to renew your hosting service.

You paid the hosting last year by PayPal. This year went to renew the service. You paid the renewal fee, also by PayPal. After several days, your hosting company charges you another amount in a PayPal subscription, which you have no idea about it. you sent three mails to ask about it, no response. you made a claim in PayPal, but it is said that it doesn’t comply with their policy. And before the renewal, you sent some technical support questions to them, also got no response.

Case study 3- Bad host provides you with slow servers and poor support!

They are the worst! Your site is down or so slows DAILY!! You keep writing help tickets everyday and their online chat guy is a talking robot. They don’t care about their customers! They keep cramming their servers full and leave their existing customers all choked up and websites that run slower than a turtle.

They will have you on a good server at first but as soon as you get comfortable and established, they turn your line into crap and you’ll start to see the difference daily as it gets worse.

Case study 4- Server goes down in a regular basis

Your site is down frequently. Sometimes your entire website can be erased. All your files went missing and you lost tons of visitors.

If you are experiencing these issues then definitely you are in hand of a bad host. Switch to a good host as soon as you can. At Splendor Host we guarantee that you will never face any of the above listed scenarios ever. If you are interested to switch to us but afraid that you might lose your important files on course then let us know by sending a mail or giving us a call or by any means. Our trained staffs will be happy to help you to move your site without losing any of your important data along with your database.

When you are paying money for hosting your website, you surely would like to host your site to a good server. But the question is how you would determine whether the server is good or not. Another very important thing you should consider when hosting your site is the level of customer support of the hosting company from which you are purchasing your hosting. In this article the factors  which you need to keep in mind before hosting your website have been discussed.

·  Reliability, server up-time and Speed of access

You should found someone reliable to host your website rather looking for a cheap host. Look for a minimum uptime of 99%. In fact, even 99% is actually too low – it really should be 99.5% or higher. The host should provide some sort of refund (e.g. prorated refund or discount) if it falls below that figure. However, without that guarantee, the web host will have little incentive to ensure that its servers are running all the time.

·  Bandwidth/ Data Transfer/ Traffic: its all same

Do not get confused with these terms. Bandwidth also referred to as “traffic” or ” data transfer ” is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site.

Don’t believe any commercial web host that advertises “unlimited bandwidth”. The host has to pay for the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, they will not silently bear your costs. In addition, while bandwidth provided is something you should always check, do not be unduly swayed by promises of incredibly huge amounts of bandwidth. To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives or the like use less than 3 GB of bandwidth per month. Your bandwidth requirements will grow over time it is better not to go for hosts that expect you to prepay for overages, since it is very hard to foresee when your site will exceed its bandwidth and by how much.

·  Disk space

For the same reason as bandwidth, watch out also for those unlimited disk space offers. Most sites need less than 1 GB of web space, so even if you are provided with a host that tempts you with unlimited space, be aware that you are unlikely to use that space, so don’t let the unlimited space be too big a factor in your consideration when comparing with other web hosts.

·  FTP, PHP, MySQL, Perl, .htaccess, SSH, crontabs

If you are paying for a site, you really should make sure you have all of these.

Note that some commercial hosts do not allow you to install PHP or Perl scripts without their approval. This is not desirable since it means that you have to wait for them before you can implement a feature on your site. Check to see if these facilities are provided.

·  SSL (secure server), Shopping Cart

If you are planning on doing any sort of business through your website, you might want to look out to see if the host provides these facilities. These facilities normally involve a higher priced package or additional charges. The main thing is to check to see if they are available at all before you commit to the host. You will definitely need SSL if you want to collect credit card payments on your site.

·  Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding

If you have your own site, you would probably want to have email addresses at your own domain, like sales@yourdomain.com, etc. Does the host provide this with the package? Does it allow you to have a catch-all email account that causes any email address at your domain to be routed to you? Can you set an email address to automatically reply to the sender with a preset message (called an auto responder)?

·  Control Panel

This is called different names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and at the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account. Do not go for a host where you have to go through their technical support each time you want to change a password or add/delete an email account.

·  Technical support

You will be surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times. Incidentally, just because a host advertises that it has 24/7 support does not necessarily mean that it really has that kind of support. Test them out by emailing at midnight and on Saturday nights, Sunday mornings, etc. Check out how long they take to respond. Besides speed of responses, check to see if the staffs are technically competent.

·  Multiple Domain Hosting and Subdomains

For those who are thinking of selling web space or having multiple domains or subdomains hosted in your account, you should look to see if they provide this, and the amount extra that they charge for this (whether it is a one-time or monthly charge, etc).

·  Server

Is the type of operating system and server important? Whether you think so or not on the theoretical level, there are a few practical reasons for looking out for the type of server.

In general, if you want to use things like write/use ASP programs, you have no choice but to look for a Windows server.

Otherwise sign up for accounts using the often cheaper, more stable and feature-laden Linux systems running the Apache server. In fact, if dynamically generated pages that can access databases (etc) is what you want, you can always use the more portable (and popular) PHP instead of tying yourself down to ASP.

·  Monthly/Quarterly/Annual Payment Plans

Most web hosts allow you to select an annual payment plan that gives you a cheaper rate than if you were to pay monthly. However paying monthly allows me to switch web hosts quickly when you find that the current host does not meet your requirements: this way, you are not tied down to a bad web host because you have prepaid for an entire year.

Hope this article will be helpful for the first time buyers. Wish you good luck with your hosting.