We’ve all seen the advertisements… monthly hosting starting at 3.95 a month. Seems to good to be true. Well it is and it isn’t. In general you get a lot for that price and most customers cannot afford the cost of elite hosting services which start at hundred of dollars per month and require skilled systems administrators to maintain. Most of the major providers are quite similar in their offerings so the key is to set your expectations and use a little common sense when choosing a hosting service.

Uptime

No shared hosting service will guarantee 100% uptime. Aside from the planned outages for maintenance and upgrades there are always unexpected issues that arise. In order to make money at that low monthly cost your site will be sharing server resources with hundreds or even thousand of other websites. Any one of these other websites can cause trouble for the entire server or worse get the server blacklisted..

There are websites that specialize in monitoring your website. You can search the internet for “website monitoring services” and find many that will ping your website at set intervals and inform you of an outage. You can also get a report of total uptime which should be in the high 90s in terms of percent. These tools will give you the knowledge you need to determine if your hosting service is doing its job.

Tips & questions when selecting a hosting provider:

1. Confirm that they support your website CMS software or platform.
2. Consider a hosting service that specializes in your website platform (i.e. WordPress, Drupal etc.).
3. Is there technical support via phone or only tickets?
4. Call their tech support before you sign up; see how long wait times are.
5. Find out if their technical support is US based or off-shore and decide what suits you best.
6. Consider purchasing a dedicated IP; this may mitigate some server issues such as blacklisting and is often useful for some types of web development.
7. Store your DNS separately from your hosting. This will allow you to point your website to another hosting service quickly if needed.
8. Consider also hosting your email separately. If your server is down you will still be able to communicate with your customers.
9. Have a plan if you have a critical window where your website must be live. You can have a backup or alternate site ready to go and repoint your DNS.
10. Don’t be afraid to change hosts! Many new hosting services include an inexpensive or free site migration as part of signing up.