I am pretty new at this (meaning earlier today:stickout: ), and I have a few more questions. Forgive the naivity or incompetence of my questions.

1) What type of payment options do I have with a webhost? I don't want to give my credit card out to someone without protections. I would prefer that they never see it. Do most webhosts use an in between party, like paypal or something? What are the best intermediate payment entities?

2) I know that many hosts oversell their servers, so that they are slow. How can I tell wether a host does this, and where do I go to find out? Are there good hard stats that I can see, to see the amount of use on the servers? I don't want to be at the mercy of some overloaded server.

3) Can I get any guarantee of a minimal speed for my site or something?

Thank you in advance.:)

1. Every web host has own payment options, you might need to enquire the host that you are interested in.

2. A very good rule of thumb, do not go with real cheap providers and you won't go wrong easily :)

3. Not that I know of. But generally if you choose to go with any popular web host in WHT who utilize good DCs, you should be able to get decent speed.

Originally posted by UltraUnixNET
2. A very good rule of thumb, do not go with real cheap providers and you won't go wrong easily :)


That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There are a number of not so cheap hosts that overload their servers as well. I know, I was once their client.

Wooly,

1) If the webhost uses a 3rd party merchant service, you can almost assume that they won't have access to any of your credit card details.

As an example, we use 2checkout and all we can get from a client is the expiry date and the first/last 4 digits of the credit card along with an address and phone number.

2) Ask to see some of their clients websites. Test the speed of the website and such. Ask to see if they are willing to move your account to another server should you find the server you are on to be overloaded.

3) There can be no guarantees. Sometimes you may get lousy speed because of your own ISP and it is not the hosts fault. However, if they do use a sub par network, that will be very obvious.

Do some research on the networks they use.

Hope that helps.

Originally posted by UltraUnixNET
1. Every web host has own payment options, you might need to enquire the host that you are interested in.

2. A very good rule of thumb, do not go with real cheap providers and you won't go wrong easily :)

3. Not that I know of. But generally if you choose to go with any popular web host in WHT who utilize good DCs, you should be able to get decent speed.

Not necessarily, there are tons of cheap providerwhich are very good and some of them are much better than those expensive one.