Okay guys, I'm narrowing down my possible hosts, but I'm still bumfuzzled over some of the terms, such as NAC hosts, Alertra (some sort of monitoring agent?), "tiers", etc.
:eek:

This isn't going to be a 'vanity' site, but a rather large project eventually (as privately run sites go). I'd like to have the option to eventually resell 'turnkey' accounts to gaming squads to pay for the expenses and labor of the main site, so reliability is big. After all, it will be *my* rep on the line if something goes wrong! :stickout:

I guess I'm asking for the 'nitty gritty' of what I should look for. Is NAC hosting better than... uh, whatever else is out there? How do I rank the datacenter/backbone of different locations?

Right now, I'd say that ease/cost of upgrading my account and quality of the connection is near the top of the list as far as making a final decision. One host I'm looking at allows a smooth upgrade from plan to plan, and only charges $1.50 /GB of excess traffic.

Well... there are a TON of hosts out there. Many are very good... many more are very bad... it's always wise to due your due dillegence when selecting a host. anyway....

You should not be worried about tiers... this is marketing fluff (okay some people may flame me for that comment). NAC is one particular datacenter that has gotten a reputation on these boards for having good uptime. This does NOT mean that just because a host uses NAC that they will have good uptime, and it does NOT mean that if a host does not use NAC they will have poor uptime.

Alertra is something completely different. They are a monitoring company and have nothing to do with webhosting. Sure, many hosts monitor their servers with Alertra, (www.alertra.com in case you were wondering), however many others have *superior* in-house systems that can alert them of downtime before Alertra's systems will.

So where does this leave you... well, back at square one. :D My advice is to research nonstop for about 2 weeks on these forums, then take the best 4 or 5 and research some more. Send some support requests to each support department, call them add odd hours and see how they respond, then see who performs best overall. Once you have done all of this, you should know who will best suit your needs.

Then, after all this, try a couple of them out. The best way to know how a company treats their customers is to be a customer! :) As long as you do your research, and don't go for the cheapest of the cheap, you should end up with a good company! :)

i like the NAC... dedicatednow is there and the center is a few miles from my house... the connections are very fast. I also hear of dedicatednow integrating an alert system so that when ure server goes down they will restart it for you (for a fee of course) but hey its nice. Any questions?

Thanks for the feedback! I'm reading through the TOSs of my semi-finalists now. One thing is that I won't be paying a year up front this time. I lost $180 when my last host disappeared without a trace. :cry:

Thanks Matt, I don't feel as overwhelmed now. I was afraid I was missing something important!