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Selecting a Hosting Company

There are hundreds of web hosting companies today. While I don't have time to review everyone of them, I believe that there are some major points that you should consider before choosing who hosts your site.

There are basically two kinds of hosting companies. The first are those who are just resellers, who don't own the web servers. They just resell the services of those who do. The second are those companies that own all their own servers and infrastructure. I prefer to choose the second because they more at stake in keeping you satisfied and have direct control to fix hardware issues.

Then there is the question of technical support. I have had several hosts over the years and the reason I have left each one is because of the poor tech support that they give. Some only had email/web tech support and I prefer to talk to a real person to solve a problem. Some had phone tech support that was overseas and I couldn't understand the technician half the time. Other worldwide companies were so large that the support department could not pick up the phone and talk to another department to solve my problem. They could only email between departments, which sometimes took days.

Don't base your decision of a host on price. The larger the company, the better pricing they can do, but the less flexible they are. As a small businessperson, you need a partner that will work with you. You may start out on a shared server, but as your business grows you may need to upgrade. Anyone wanting to add an ecommerce section will want to move up to a virtual private server or dedicated server for better security and a dedicated IP address. Ask your prospective host how such upgrades are done.

Having learned from experience, I took a lot of time interviewing my current hosting company, InMotion Hosting, before picking them for this site. I spoke to the sales department for about a half hour. I called support and talked to them for awhile. I laid out my plans for the next two years and asked about server migration. I asked about where there tech support was located and how responsive it was. I discussed the problems I had with other host providers to see what responses I received.  The extra time doing this was worth it, as their support department is the best I have dealt with in the last two decades.

Make sure you do your homework. If you are not having a custom site built, then check out the applications there system will automatically install for you. As an example, InMotion Hosting offers site builders, blogs, classified ads, helpdesk, discussion boards, ecommerce, image gallery, polls, surveys, and wiki software options for you to customize your site. 

Finally, you can't just build your site and forget it. Maintenance need to be performed on it. Although the host companies normally backup all their servers on a daily basis, they are not responsible for your information if it is lost. You need to do backups of both your site and any databases connected to it.