A Practical Guide to Choose a Reliable Website Hosting Company

As many of you know, my company sells e-business applications all over the world. Many times we found customers that, in addition to an e-business application, they need a hosting service. In order to give an end to end service, we offer our customers a hosting service based on resellers plans that we frequently purchase online. Other customers what to purchase their hosting plans themselves separately from our services, and so they asked us how to choose between the different available hosting companies.

Here is my practical guide to choose a reliable hosting company. I’ve to admit that, since using these techniques, we never have a problem with any of the hosting companies that we resell.

1. Select the server operative system you need.

Before you start choosing the best hosting company, you should know if you need a Windows hosting or a Linux one. This depends on the application that you’ll host there. Ask your programmers and designers which server type you need; they’ll probably help you with this subject. Even some Windows servers also support PHP and MySQL, if you really need a Linux plan, it’s better to get a Linux plan and not a Windows one that supports Linux extensions.

2. Determine the amount of space you need.

Nowadays, almost all hosting plan has a huge amount of disk space and data transfer. But still exists some MINI plans that both features are not too high. Perhaps you are planning to host a small application and you only need a great amount of data transfer; maybe you are planning to host lot of media (images, videos, etc) and you require extra space. Before start looking for a hosting company, you should estimate the amount of disk space and data transfer that you business will need, at least, for the next year. You can also get help for your programmers and designers.

3. Search for well known hosting companies.

Once you know the server system you need (Windows, Linux, etc), and the disk pace / data transfer require for your business, you can start searching the web for companies that provides the hosting services. Don’t get into panic. You’ll find thousand companies that can be your potential hosting providers, but be sure that only a few deserve that responsibility. The best way for searching companies, is by recommendation. Ask your colleagues, talk with other companies and let them tell you their experience with their hosting providers. At this point, I recommend you to open a spreadsheet and gather all the information you find for each company in order to help you taking the final decision. It’s very important to pay attention and see if the company offers a plan that fits your need.

4. Find hosting reviews

Once you get a list of potential hosting providers, you can star looking how other people rated that hosting companies. There are many hosting reviews sites: FindmyHost.com, TopHosts.com, WebHostMagazine.com, RateMyHost.com, WHReviews.com, etc. You can find many good and bad comments over there. Some of them could be totally invented in order to position a company on the top; some of them are real costumers’ comments. Just check that reviews and see if how many good/bad comments that those companies have and make your appreciation.

5. Test their service

Finally, here’s the most important task in the process of choosing a reliable hosting company. As you could see, all hosting companies say that they have a 24×7 support. But.., is that really true? Here’s what I used to do:

I tried to contact those companies in some special holidays, for instance, on December the 24th, near midnight, or the day after. I also contact them on December the 31st near midnight, or the day after. I also check where in the world the hosting datacenter is located and figure which holidays that country have. For instance, if the company is located in the US, I contact them on July the 4th. I used to talk to a representative, via chat, or phone and ask them some commercial doubts.

Just figure this: If a hosting company has a commercial people waiting for your call or chat during that special days (and pays for that, of course), probably they also have a support team in the same moment in order to attend any customer call or requirements. So, they seem to be really prepared for any inconvenience, anytime, 24×7. In the other hand, If a company does not pay a commercial representative to be online and ready for your call or chat during that special moments, we can not infer too much about their support area, but clearly they do not have all their critical (sales and support) staff 24×7.

This is the most important part of any decision process for a hosting company. Test their service, especially their commercial one, during those hours and days that you know that almost everyone are celebrating, or sleeping. If they can attend you it’s because there’s somebody that will listen to you anytime.

I did a matrix decision with many hosting companies and I frequently updated it with this information. Many of them fail on the fifth evaluation point.

In order to end this article, if you need my personal recommendation, maybe there are many other really good hosting companies, some of them cheaper, but, up today, we trusted our hosting in the following companies that have really good qualifications: WebHostingbuz.com, HostGator.com and Rexoy.net.

If you are looking for a reliable hosting company, just follow this practical guide and do not base your decision only in the hosting price.

You can find this article in http://www.goingebusiness.com

Linux Vs. Windows Webhosting, Does it Make a Difference

One of the most confusing decisions someone new to web hosting will have to make is which platform their server should be on. There are a number of different choices out there but the main two are Linux and Windows web servers. There are also a lot of sources of information about hosting, but the majority of them are tainted by the author’s biased personal opinion unfortunately confusing the issue. Having just put in some solid hours researching the topic I have come to the conclusion that in general it quite probably does not matter which server you use. For the majority of people it will be far more important to choose a really good web host than to worry about the server-type that they implement.

Microsoft developed and owns the Windows operating system. Linux is open source and generally free. This means it can often be more expensive to set up and run a Windows server. However, this fact doesn’t really affect you unless you are actually setting up a server for yourself and if you’re reading this article then I’m guessing that it’s safe to assume you’re not. This article is going to offer information for those trying to decide which hosting company to go with. The cost involved in running a server does not affect the cost of a web-hosting package as much as you may think. Despite the general opinion that Windows servers are more expensive to run, buying a Windows hosting package can often turn out to be just as cheap or even cheaper than an equivalent Linux hosting package.

Some people naturally assume that because their PC runs Windows they need to buy a Windows hosting package. This isn’t true. Access to your web account will most likely be through FTP or a control panel and both servers support these methods. The main difference is that some of the FTP commands are slightly different between Linux and Windows and some FTP programs will be designed with one or the other in mind. This means you may occasionally find that when you try and get your FTP program to do something it returns an error message, but it won’t happen very often.

Your choice of server platforms should be dictated by the use to which you intend to put it. The majority of web features run fine on both platforms including PHP, mySQL, POP3 etc. If you intend to create your site using ASP, FrontPage, the .NET environment, Windows Streaming Media, Access, MSSQL, or any of the other Microsoft proprietary technologies then you probably need to use a Windows host. There is limited support for a number of these technologies in Linux, but they can be expensive and are usually lacking in features. It is probably worth considering the fact that if you use server specific technologies and then change hosts you’ll have a much harder time of it than if you use technologies that can be run on any system. Having it run generic technologies removes the need to focus on specifics and allows you to focus on the quality of service itself.

The reliability and stability of the different platforms have been the topic of many long arguments. The main reason that Windows is seen as being insecure is that it is the most widely used operating system for home PC’s. People spend more time looking for flaws in the most common system. With Linux being the most common server type, it has a surprising number of successful hack attempts made on it. In the end the security of both platforms comes down to the competency of the system administrators. If you are security minded then you’ll do better to make sure that the hosting company is reputable and highly skilled than to worry about the server they use.

In terms of performance there’s not a huge difference between the two servers. Linux reportedly performs faster because Windows (as usual) attempts to offer an ‘all in one’ package instead of the extendable Linux implementation. You’ll generally not notice a difference but if performance is of utmost importance to you then maybe this will influence your decision.

I’ve come to the conclusion that unless you are specifically using features that are unique to one platform or another your time will be much better spent looking for a really good quality host than a really good quality server. Developers are constantly improving both Linux and Windows so they should be fairly close in terms of features, security, and reliability for a long time. It’s the people implementing them that you should be basing your decision on.

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