Tips on How To Select a Reliable Hosting Provider

[apondonet]

By James Opiko

To conduct a successful marketing campaign on the Internet, your website must be hosted by a reliable web hosting company. Selecting the 'wrong' provider can prove very costly along the line.

Below I detail a few important aspects of the selection process based purely on my own experiences over the last six years.

First and foremost do searches in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Simply enter terms like "Complaints about 'Your Potential Host's Name'" 'Hosting Reviews', etc..... You will find a lot of stuff regarding your potential host. Search for 'web hosting forums'; there are numerous specialty forums on the web that discuss web hosting exclusively.

Since there are thousands of hosting companies in the web hosting market, naturally during your research you will encounter hundreds of web hosting resource sites loaded with numerous and sometimes bogus reviews and recommendations, consequently your research process must be very thorough.

If you consistently find too many complaints about your potential web hosting company.... beware!

A company that offers too many features for too little is suspect. If they are offering huge amounts of bandwidth and disk space for a very low price, be careful! Here is why: The company will most likely be forced to host numerous websites per server, resulting in congestion and server overload. The result: Your site may be too slow and may experience lots of downtime.

A foreign-based hosting company may be too far away from your customers. It won't serve you well if your host is based in Australia and your targeted customers are based in The United States. On the contrary, if your are marketing to customers exclusively in Australia from The United States, a web hosting company in Australia would be OK. If you are marketing worldwide, your choice becomes a little bit more complicated.... unless of course you are Google, Yahoo or MSN, big companies who host their websites almost everywhere worldwide! Generally, I prefer web-hosting companies located in The United States.

How fast is your web host?

Find a couple of sites that are hosted by your potential web hosting company and test how fast their pages load on your computer.

You also may execute the PING and TRACEROUTE commands on these websites to determine their suitability. Executing the ping command is called pinging a website and it determines how quickly a server can receive and send back a piece of data through your connection. When you run ping it sends a small packet of data and calculates the time it takes to get a response from the server. It is executed four times by default and a small report of average, minimum, and maximum response times will be displayed. A ping output typically consists of the packet size used, the host queried, the ICMP sequence number, the time to live, and the latency. All times are given in milliseconds.

A ping output indicating large values and/or lost packets consistently over a period of time ....is a red flag!

Please note that if you have a bad or restrictive connection (Your ISP), the results may be skewed. Firewalls and proxy servers installed in your system or network can sometimes interfere with the ping operation. Also, some web hosting companies do not allow pinging of their servers, in which case you will get a 'Request Timed Out message'.

The Traceroute utility displays the connection [path] through the Internet between your computer and the potential web hosting company's server(s). The path between these two locations has many routers, computers and other devices along it, which help move Internet information. Each movement from one device to the other is called a hop. Too many hops is cause for concern ....do several Traceroutes for comparison!

Based on my experiences with different hosting companies over the years, I regard the following Web Hosting companies as the most reliable. I am sure there are many other good hosting companies out there, but it would be unfair to comment about a company that I have never dealt with.

One of my websites, TheCertificationHub.com has been hosted by Ipowerweb since 2000. There were problems at first, typical when a web hosting company is experiencing a spurt in growth. In the year 2000, they had a customer base of 15,000. Five years later this number has grown to almost 300,000 and their service level has improved tremendously over these five years. Ipowerweb is one of the best web hosting companies on the Internet. A first class hosting company which I highly recommend.

I moved my other website, ClubAfrika.com from Globat to iPowerWeb beginning April 25, 2005. With Ipowerweb I have experienced much less frequent downtimes, few email delays and failures. The customer service is superb and well coordinated as expected. The only problem I had at the beginning was their inability to transfer our database from Globat. Club Afrika is targeted at users in Africa, most of who are still on dial-up. It therefore makes no sense that these users have to wait for 5+ minutes for pages to load up. In this respect Ipowerweb has delivered. My site is no longer 'snail slow' and in spite of a few incompetent TIER 1 Technicians here and there, overall I am satisfied with their service. Globat may improve in future....I suspect that they are having 'growth problems just like Ipowerweb had when I first started hosting with them. If they do, then they might be worth considering for they offer the most 'humongous' features in the web-hosting business. But be cautious, 'Greed' almost always translates into poor website performance....some of their offerings are just too good to be true, for lack of appropriate words.

I have been hosting another website, ApondoSystems.com on Lunar Pages servers since 2000. Lunar Pages web hosting plans start at 5000MB of storage and 400GB of transfer for only $7.95. It is my opinion that Lunar Pages is a great web hosting company. Great website uptime and customer service! Very few websites require more than 1000MB of disk space (Apondo Systems has over 300 pages and I haven't even used one half of the allocated space), so if what you are looking for is quality first, Lunar pages is a good bet. If you are looking for extra databases, humongous disk space and bandwidth, then take a look at iPowerWeb, which is a topnotch company too, or even Globat.

StartLogic is a relatively new web hosting company, a reseller of IPowerweb Web Hosting Services. Naturally, you will expect them to follow in the great footsteps of Ipowerweb. Being the #1 reseller of Ipowerweb, StartLogic's hosting infrastructure is most probably maintained by Ipowerweb, a large and reputable web hosting company. They offer both Windows and Unix Hosting.

Due to the 'newness' of the company and the fact that I have not used their services, I cannot judge them authoritatively, but based on the comments I have seen so far, all over the Internet and by virtue of their relationship with Ipowerweb, I think this is a good low cost web hosting company.

GoDaddy currently offers one of the cheapest prices for Domain Names and Hosting Services. The pricing on packages is very competitive. With Godaddy website templates you can get a nice-looking Web site with ample storage. Reports indicate that their performance is above average. One thing you may not like is that they do not have an 800 number for Technical Support. They prefer local numbers. I think their pricing especially for Domain Names is very reasonable and is worth giving a shot. Also, if you are looking for just a handful of features, Godaddy offers very flexible packages....they even allow you to pay for your hosting services on a monthly basis! The control panel is kind of 'tight', scripting Gurus may not like some of the restrictions but I think Godaddy hosting is worth a try. I hosted AfroArticles.com briefly at GoDaddy but quickly moved it to Hostgator for one and only one reason: Godaddy does not support CRON JOBS, a server feature vital to AfroArticles.com .

My website, AfroArticles.com is hosted at Hostgator. I was initially attracted by two things: Unlimited Databases and the option of paying monthly and not the usual yearlong contract. This means that if I am to disapprove of their services during my self imposed trial period, I will be able to opt out with ease.

Well, I haven't because I love the friendly and professional customer service support offered by Hostgator and my website has been running exceptionally well. I am yet to experience any unscheduled downtimes.

If you are looking to re-sell hosting, then consider Hostgator. Although the pricing is slightly above the average in comparison to other top hosting companies, I feel that the reliability of their services, the bandwidth, storage, unlimited databases and numerous other features included with their packages are well worth it. Hostgator is a topnotch hosting company, at the same level as iPowerweb and Lunar Pages.

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[KLB]

Some other factors that people don't think of when choosing a web hosting company are: geographic location, geopolitical situation, supporting regional infrastructure, emergency preparedness and physical security.

Geographic location: Where is the datacenter located? What are the natural disasters that are likely to hit it? This is important because natural disasters can take a datacenter down for extended periods of time. For instance a datacenter located in parts of California might be subjected to severe earthquakes, while a datacenter in Florida runs the risk of getting hit by a major hurricane.

Is the datacenter located in a floodplain? Once when looking for a web host I came across a datacenter in an old brick warehouse that was located on the Mississippi river in the flood plain. If the river left its banks, you could pretty much be assured that the web host was going to go offline.

When looking for web hosts, I look for datacenters that are located in geologically and climatologically boring areas. For instance, my current web host (Pair Networks) is located in Pittsburg Pennsylvania, and is well above any floodplains. Pittsburg PA is well outside of any major threats from severe and destructive weather like hurricanes or tornados and is also in a geologically stable part of the country.

Geopolitical situation: How stable is the area politically speaking? For example a few years ago California had serious problems with their electrical supply in part because of regulatory problems. This caused serious electrical shortages and rolling blackouts. Americans sometimes forget that there are datacenters in other parts of the world. What is the regulatory climate where the datacenter is housed? How stable is the government? Is there regional strife? For instance, would one really want to host a website in China or even Israel?

Supporting regional infrastructure: Having a great datacenter isn't enough, how good is the regional infrastructure?

How reliable is the electric supply (think California a few years ago)? If an area does not have a modern electrical supply infrastructure or if the infrastructure could become compromised by severe weather there could be reliability problems and the datacenter may be forced to rely on generators more than it should.

How robust is the communications grid? When I first started my website, I was living in Fairbanks Alaska and hosted my site with a local ISP. The problem was that there was really only one communications cable between Alaska and rest of the world and it seemed some fishing trawler would take it out at least once a year. When this happened all communications had to be transmitted via Satellite and this ground everything to a slow crawl even by 1996 standards. I now live in Maine and a few years ago a backhoe took out an overhead fiber optic cable near the state border with New Hampshire. While there were multiple telecommunications providers in Maine and the company I was working for had multiple T-1 connections from two different providers for their WAN, it turned out that both providers were using this same cable and as a result the company's WAN went down for at least a day or so until the cable was fixed.

The web host having multiple redundant telecommunications, providers is very important, but it is also important that each telecommunications provider is using their own cables and in some geographic areas this is not the case.

Emergency preparedness: Even the best electrical systems can go down, and there always seems to be some errant backhoe operator gunning for fiber optic cables. HVAC systems, routers and servers fail. How prepared for these events is the web host you are using? Do they have backup generators? How long can their generators run? Do they have emergency refueling contracts in place? Do they have redundant HVAC systems? Do servers have multiple network cards connected to different routers? Do servers have multiple mirrored hard drives? Do they run complete tape backups on a nightly basis? How long does it take them to swap out a server when one goes down? Do they have spare servers waiting around just in case? Can you live with your website going down for an hour, a day or a week?

Physical security: What security measures are in place to protect the datacenter? Is access to servers limited to a select core of employees? Do they use closed circuit cameras to monitor the datacenter? Are visitors allowed into the datacenter? Having a well hardened server does no good if one is able to gain physical access to a server. Good hosts have multiple layers of security in place to keep unauthorized people from gaining physical access to servers and the datacenter's network (routers, switches, cables, etc.).

Reliability goes well beyond a friendly support staff and good server hardware. If your website is important and reliability is important to you, investigate the infrastructure your web host is using. Oh and don't expect the most reliable hosts to be cheap, because a datacenter with this kind of reliability is not cheap to operate.

One final note if reliability is really important and down time is not acceptable, do not host your site on shared servers because on a shared server your site will always be at the mercy of another website going bad because of a sudden popularity surge or bad website programming sucking down all the processing power.

For the record, I have been using Pair Networks for around six years now.

[Linda Buquet]

Wow you two. Both great long articles filled with some very important points.

Thanks for sharing.