Deciding on the Best Web Hosting Company

As with most investments, our first impulse when choosing a web host is to go with the least expensive. Hey, they’re all alike, why spend more?

There are a number of objective criteria that differentiate one web host from others and cost is only one of them. And not the most important one. Selecting a company based on cost alone is no different than choosing an auto mechanic based on cost alone. Sure, he may maintain or repair your car cheaper. But will the car spend all the time in the shop instead of on the road?

The first consideration is ‘power’. Do they posses the capacity to handle your traffic and provide adequate performance? Most hosting companies will advertise that they have substantial bandwidth and hundreds of servers. They’re often telling the truth.

But there’s a difference between current capacity and usable capacity. If they also have thousands of other websites with millions of visitors each day the available or free capacity will be significantly lower. A large pickup truck may be able to tow 5,000 lbs., but not if it’s already carrying 4,999.

Be certain to ask about available capacity, and have the prospective company back it up with reliable numbers. If you can’t understand the information they provide, find someone to help explain it.

Next, and a very close 2nd, is reliability. A lot of power is useless if it’s cut often. Downtime is a normal part of business. Even Google and Microsoft go down now and then. The difference is, it happens infrequently and they have fail-over plans. This means, if their site/system does go down it’s either back up again in a few seconds, or you never see the outage because a backup system takes over automatically and seamlessly.

Be certain to grill the company closely regarding their up time. They’ll often tout 99.6%, or some such figure. But, similar to the on-time figures of the airlines, those statistics can be shaded by adjusting the definition of ‘up time’. What matters to you is whether your visitors will be able to view your site at any time of the day or night they might want to.

Learn what systems, both technical and human, they have set up to deal with failures of all sorts. Servers can break, networks can fail, hard disks can become defective and lose data even when the other components continue to perform properly. The result is YOUR site is unavailable, which is the only thing that matters to you. The web hosting company should be able to handle all of that and have your website up again very quickly.

Last, but not least, is security. With the continuing prevalence of viruses and spam, you need to be sure that the web hosting company you choose has an array of methods for dealing with them. This means a good technical plan and staff who are experienced in handling with those issues. The old quote: ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ is more true here than anywhere else.

All these criteria are central to finding a web hosting company that can provide the services you need. After those criteria are met by a number of candidates, then you can start narrowing them down by cost.