WDTalk

Contact Information

Contact information and procedures? How easy is it to reach their billing, sales and support departments?

Competent

Are they knowledgeable? Are they professional? Do they seem genuinely interested in your concerns and requirements?

Are they a middleman?

Are they a reseller, or does the buck end with them?

Options

What add-ons/options do they offer? Are control panels, like cPanel or DirectAdmin included? Can they host Linux and Windows platforms?

Longevity

How long have they been in business? Will their support hours change once school starts? Do they have 24/7/365 phone and ticket support?

Staff

How many employees do they staff? It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you only have one or two staff to respond to requests or issues.

Terms of Services and Acceptable Use Policy

Do they have a published TOS/AUP? And does this correspond to marketing material on their home page? An example would be bold marketing ads for unlimited bandwidth when their TOS specifically addresses termination procedures for exceeding allowable use.

Does your web host provider offer personal tours of their datacenter(s)?

Do they feature online tours? See for example main_tourmain_tourTOURSmain_tourmain_tourmain_tour.

How long have they been in business?

Are they members of the BBB?

What level of security do they employ?

What is their uptime?

Do they offer a Service Level Agreement?

What are their Terms of Service?

Do they have a money back guarantee?

Do they offer managed services?

Are their technicians certified?

Are they a one-stop-shop?

Do they offer control panels, and which ones?

Do they offer both Windows and Linux solutions?

Do they charge setup fees?

Do they have failover bandwidth?

Do they offer BGP bandwidth?

Do they offer cross-connects?

Do they offer live chat support?

Do they offer 24/7 phone support?

Do they offer live event monitoring?

Do they offer disaster recovery plans?

Are their plans scalable?

Will they customize a plan for you?

Will they provide references?

I’m sure there are many many more questions you may think of, but these are a great place to start. Finding the right provider with whom to entrust your data requires some forethought and research. Don’t over think the entire process. Search the Internet for positive / negative reviews, narrow down your list and then call each prospective vendor. 

Gauge which provider best fits your business model. How important and relevant are each of the above? Assign a value to each, total the numbers and compare vendors. Often, the correct match jumps of the page and hits you square in the forehead. Often the offer seems too good to be real – for instance, an offer of unlimited bandwidth on a VPS. That’s just not realistic given the cost of bandwidth to the vendor. 

I would recommend assigning a heavier weight to a disaster recovery plan. And also to their technical expertise, as it directly relates to the level of service you can expect to receive from them. 

You’d be amazed how many hosts do NOT offer phone support, or only during business hours. Uptime can be verified to some extent as there are sites that monitor hosts, but those do not necessarily monitor every router – so the numbers can be misleading. If your prospective host publicly lists anything less than 99.9% uptime, I’d recommend looking elsewhere. Downtime can cost thousands in lost revenue and disgruntled clients. 

Do you recognize their references? Are those references credible? 

Even if your application doesn’t fit a plan you see featured on their website, call and ask them if they’ll customize a plan for you. You may be pleasantly surprised. 

To your success

- Steve

Questions to ask a shared web host provider

• Do they offer both Windows, Mac and  Linux solutions?
• Do they offer an easy to use control panel?
• Do they charge setup fees?
• How many emails do they include their packages?
• Does their network have failover bandwidth?
• Does their network have  BGP bandwidth?
• How much space and bandwidth are they offering?
• Do they offer any Dynamic Controls?
• Do they offer live chat support?
• Do they offer 24/7 phone support?
• Do they offer disaster recovery plans?
• Are their plans scalable?
• Will they customize a plan for you?
• Will they provide references?

I’m sure there are many many more questions you may think of, but these are a great place to start. Finding the right provider with whom to entrust your data requires some forethought and research. Don’t over think the entire process. Search the Internet for positive / negative reviews, narrow down your list and then call each prospective vendor. 

Gauge which provider best fits your business model. How important and relevant are each of the above? Assign a value to each, total the numbers and compare vendors. Often, the correct match jumps of the page and hits you square in the forehead. Often the offer seems too good to be real – for instance, an offer of unlimited bandwidth or disk space. That’s just not realistic given the finite limits on disk space and the cost of bandwidth to the vendor. 

I would recommend assigning a heavier weight to a disaster recovery plan. And also to their technical expertise, as it directly relates to the level of service you can expect to receive from them. 

You’d be amazed how many hosts do NOT offer phone support, or only during business hours. Uptime can be verified to some extent as there are sites that monitor hosts, but those do not necessarily monitor every router – so the numbers can be misleading. If your prospective host publicly lists anything less than 99.99% uptime, I’d recommend looking elsewhere. Downtime can cost thousands in lost revenue and disgruntled clients. 

Do you recognize their references? Are those references credible? 

Even if your application doesn’t fit a plan you see featured on their website, call and ask them if they’ll customize a plan for you. You may be pleasantly surprised.

I know this seems like a strange question, but I saw a poll on a forum this morning where quite a few web hosts voted that they were NOT legally registered, yet still advertising services online. Those services ranged from shared and VPS to dedicated servers. As a consumer, how would you differentiate one from the other? If you’re in Missouri, you can go to the Secretary of State’s website and search for Business Entities here.

Why are so many web hosts not registered?

In spite that US businesses are legally required to be registered, designing and posting a web hosting business online has become so simple that even teenagers and college students do this with regularity.  Some of them are very resourceful, have well thought out business plans, and work their plans successfully. On the other hand, many of these kids have no understanding of general business principles, thus struggle, along with their unsuspecting clientele. What happens when you sign a contract with a web host that is not legally registered, and run by someone, maybe 15 years old? They’re not legally bound by that contract because of their age. All the risk falls on the consumer. The answer as to why so many are not registered is varied. Many of these owners are tech savvy, but not business savvy. The economy is forcing many to find supplemental avenues for generating revenue, and see web hosting as an easy sell. Providing support after the sale is the hard sell, and this is what leads to so many start up businesses failing in their first year.

How important is your data?

If you’re considering which host to select, ask yourself this, “How important is the data that I’ll be entrusting to that host?” Is it mission critical? If your host should disappear, would your data disappear with them? If you have an issue at 3AM on a Sunday morning, will your host have anyone on staff ready to take your call and resolve that issue, or will you have to wait until normal business hours M-F 9-5, or worse yet,  in-between classes?

In web hosting, a marketing rage in the past few years has been offers of unlimited space and bandwidth. The only thing I can think of offhand that is really unlimited – is time. What kind of servers are these sites being hosted on anyway? What’s the largest hard drive physically available? If I wanted bandwidth at 1129 Tbps, would that be possible?

There are real physical limits on bandwidth and space.

The bandwidth available to data centers in the Midwest is different than the bandwidth offered, for example, in NY, Dallas, LA and Chicago. Data centers have to pay upstream providers for the bandwidth they offer to their clients. Some upstream providers with varying latency on their network price out lower or higher than others. Data centers routinely offer a blend of 3, 4 or more providers through BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), but can offer a preferred network with failover to a blended network – significantly reducing the end client’s bandwidth cost.

Are unlimited plans at $3.99/Month realistic?

In one word – NO. I’ve yet to find one offer of unlimited space and bandwidth at any price that doesn’t have a corresponding TOS and AUP that addresses the specific bandwidth and space allowable. So why do so many hosts offer these packages? It’s all about perception of value – to the unsuspecting general public. The offer sounds fantastic, until you buy into the plan and get canceled by that provider for violating some clause of their TOS. I read threads every day of the week posted in forums on the Internet by unsuspecting clients – wondering why their account was canceled by host xxx?

Compare this to your own business.

Do you find that managing your prospects expectations works out best? That ‘never needs sharpening’ knife isn’t really going to last forever, is it? Here’s a simple question to ask any provider that offers unlimited space on their webserver. How large is the hard drive that I’ll be hosted on?  Unlimited? Not by a long shot!