Choosing Hosting Provider: Selection Criteria
Most businesses get rather flustered when choosing their cheap hosting company / hosting provider for the first time. After all, if you knew what you were doing, wouldn't you be hosting the website yourself? Probably.
There are so many factors that go into providing excellent hosting services for your website. How do you know what questions to ask?
Choosing Hosting Provider: Crucial Questions
It's important you ask prospective cheap hosting providers many questions in order to ensure your site doesn't become prey for hackers, or experience unpleasant downtime. But what should you ask?
As long as you ask the following ten questions, you should be on your way to an excellent website experience!
Follow theste Steps While Choosing Hosting Provider
Questions
1. What's your security policy ? ask while Choosing Hosting Provider?
If you are going with a shared hosting, you want policies that address this type of hosting. The same can be said about dedicated hosting or cloud hosting. Security should not be solely your responsibility, and malware/virus scans should be conducted daily, not monthly or yearly.
2. Do you provide SSL? ask while Choosing Hosting Provider?
If your website is e-commerce or stores any sensitive customer/employee data at all, you need a good SSL certificate. Make sure if they offer it, it covers all of your security bases. If not, a multitude of third-party SSL providers exist for you to turn to.
3. How reliable is your network Hosting Provider?
No one wants downtime. This could spell disaster in the form of lost customers. What is their uptime guarantee? What happens when an outage does occur, and what's the response time guarantee (if any)? Contact other customers if possible to learn about their experiences.
4. Ask About Backup Policy while Choosing Hosting Provider?
Backups should be conducted at least once per day. More is obviously better, but be wary of companies that do it less often than once a day. Also, you should ensure your databases are being backed up just as often as your files.
5. What are you accountable for in terms of an outage?
Even if they answer this question, scrutinize the SLA in order to see when the company holds themselves responsible, and when it does not. Maybe there's a clause that states they are not accountable in the event of a tornado or power outage beyond their control. How flexible are they when you ask them if they'll amend this clause? It can be as simple as asking for charges to be suspended during this time period so you aren't stuck paying for service that isn't working properly.
6. How easy is it to scale up when needed?
You need more space and bandwidth. Will this process be painless? Are you bound in your current contract for a period of time, resulting in high charges to change your plan to suit your growing website?
7. How responsive is your customer service and tech support?
A quick response is key to running a good website. Will this company provide that to you? Again, contact other customers in order to determine their satisfaction with the quality of service. Their experiences are often more telling than the response you'll get from the hosting provider!
8. What if my needs change completely? Can you accommodate that?
So you need more than extra bandwidth. You need to change hosting environments altogether. How easy will it be to switch over, and is support provided?
9. Do you offer security monitoring?
This is often important in order to discover the moment a site is compromised, rather than a site visitor finding out the hard way. This includes things like firewalls and malware scanners.
10. What if I am dissatisfied?
Does the provider have a guarantee in place? Will you be penalized, or will you be fully refunded? There are many different satisfaction guarantee policies that vary from company to company, so if you aren't comfortable with one, research another.
Choosing hosting provider is not an easy feat, but if you ask the right questions, it can be less stressful of an experience.
