this is a question i thought of last night, probably quite often people have answered this question, in a repetative manor, but i want to go deeper.

how do you choose who you are hosting with/do business with?

i want to leave it at that for now, i have more, but i want to get a few of those usual responses to get this rolling.
my wife just reminded me that we are going on a leadership weekend today, so i have till five.

thanks, i'll check back in a half hour with the second part.

~guest

for the controllers of this place, i do not mean for this to be a poll or anything, this info is simply for discussion as hopefully we will see if people care to contribute, thank you.

i'll talk to myself :-)

when i first started looking for hosting companies, it was the detail of servers, price, and customer service.

since then i have learned to look at, how many locations they have, where they are located, average rent for space in the area where they are renting.

and a few other things.

it helps a ton, now we'll try again, what do you look for?

~guest

how fast can I get the support on the line .... and how knowledgeable they are

Probably the short list, not necessarily in order, would be:

Costs

- monthly fee or periodic cost
- set-up fee, if any
- amount of bandwidth provided
- cost of bandwidth overages
- costs of any special services or add-ons
- cost of additional storage, if needed

Basic Features

- amount of storage space provided
- CGI support (Perl, PHP)
- control Panel
- e-mail (standard and web-based)
- mailing list support
- statistics tracking and quality of reporting
- daily site back-up
- back-up generator support
- secure facility

Support

- how support is provided (e-mail, phone, HumanClick, etc.)
- typical support response time
- costs of support, if any

Connectivity

- redundant connections
- close routing to the backbone

Of course, every site has different needs, but this is probably a fair "punch list" from which to start evaluating a host.


[Edited by etLux on 10-27-2000 at 12:02 PM]

Its various stages for me.
1. Wether they fit what I wont
2. The cost of extra stuff like bandwidth, space, etc.
3. The resources they have

And of course support would play a roll in all this. Simply, coz you have to use there support to find out these things. Some, rather most have it listed on there site, but I would rather use there support to find out. ;)

thank you for your responses!

so now lets go further than the support, system setup, or config of the server...

what i am trying to get at is this

has anyone used Financial statements, to sway thier judgement?

do you look at space aquired and used by the company, and how much that costs?

bassically, i have seen people talk about the advertised area of a company, do you look deeper?

food for thought and fun

~guest

how do i choose? I just sorta wing it :)

seriouslly though... First off I dig up and look at all the info i can off the site... user policies, orderforms, contact info, etc, etc... then barage(sp?) them with question after question, even the ones that are totally obvious. It's not so much the answers(although they are important) as with the quickness and quality of the replies. When you're able to spend an hour and a half sending and receiving 5-6 email to the same guy/gal and they are always friendly and helpful even when you're being a pain in the rear, i give them high marks...

secondly i contact tech support...I know it's not very nice but i'll contact the tech support with a fictitious problem and see how they react.

finally i go around to all the web host index sites and search for review, complaints, etc.

long winded but it does the trick... after careful investigation I ended up with my current host and I couldn't be happier!

cool, thanks for the reply!

if this really takes off, it will be great, it is fun and interesting to know the thoughts of other people and how they come to the same outcome that others do, in the same business area, just everyone does it a little differently.

then we can learn and share and grow and change!

more food for thought...

fake tech support questions was done, that's good in a way, because it keeps them on thier toes, especially if it is a slow day, it also keeps the techs minds on new problems and possible solutions, interesting

let's see

is it an overall necessity for everyone that the customer service is very good?

are there any other ways people go about finding thier business' or hosts?

i'll check back on sunday, time to get ready for a leadership weekend seminar with my wife.

thanks everyone,

~guest