Finding a Web Host Guide

So, now that you’ve got out of bed and decided to look for a web host you find yourself in a rather uncomfortable situation. There are 923,422,194 web hosts to choose from (I made that number up). At this point you can either start loosing your hair, or if you continue reading this guide you will choose the ONE web host that’s right for you without any headaches. You may want to get some potato chips or peanuts because this may be somewhat of a long read, trust me, it’s worth it, by the time I’m done with you, you’ll be telling all your friends how to find the right web host for them.

You’ve probably heard this one at some point in your life, but I cannot stress this enough, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. This statement is especially true when it comes to web hosting, many companies will try to appeal to you with ridiculously low prices and tons of space and bandwidth (I’ll explain what that is later on). Let’s think logically for a few minutes, if you have an apple and want to share it with your friends, you’ll cut it into smaller pieces. Now let’s say you want to share your one apple with 200 of your friends, they’ll be stuck with small pieces and call you cheap. Here’s how this relates to the hosting industry, when you’re paying $2 for 200 GB bandwidth and 20 GB of space the company has to put a huge amount of people on one server to break even, so what happens is that the server becomes overloaded, and as punishment for falling for a scam like this your site may be very slow, or have lots of downtime.

The next thing that you may want to look at when searching for your hosting company is the location of their servers. First think of your website and what kind of visitors you’re expecting and where they will be coming from. You probably won’t want a web host with servers in China if you’re located in Texas and most of your website visitors are located in the United States. What’s going to happen is that you and your visitors will experience slow site loads because of the distance between them and the web host. Although the location of the web host is not THE most important thing, this will help you eliminate some companies.

The next thing you want to eliminate is ‘slow’ web hosts. ‘Slow’ is a relative term and once again depends on your location, and your ISP. I would ask a few friends of mine to help me out with this one, the first thing you may want to do is browse around the potential web host’s website and see how quick the pages load, this will give you an impression of how quick the host is. One thing I know is that most hosts will not host their website on the same server as their customers, so try to find a couple of sites that the potential web host is hosting and browse them, see how fast the pages load, see if there are any file downloads and check the speeds you get. Next you may want to check pings and trace routes; basically this will show you the health of the network of your potential web host. Follow the steps I mention to check the pings and trace routes. People with Windows should click Start, and then run. In the dialog box enter CMD then press enter. You will get a window called a DOS prompt in which you will type (without the quotes of course) ‘ping webhost.com’ (replace webhost.com with the address of the webhost). You will get 4 lines saying: Reply from xx.xx.xx.xx bytes = 32 time= XXms TTL=xxx. Your concern should be the time= XXms, rule of thumb for this number is the lower the better, anything under 150 is great, above 150 I’d be a little weary of choosing that company as a webhost. A trace route tells you how many computers you have to go through to get to your webhost, once again, the lower the amount of hops (computers) the better. Follow the same steps as above to get into the DOS prompt except now type ‘tracert webhost.com’ (replace webhost.com with the actual address of the web hosting company). Basically here you’re looking for the amount of hops and the time it takes for each hop, as with the pings, the lower the number the better.

So now that you’ve eliminated the cheaters, those that are far away from you, and the slow web hosts you have to eliminate those that lack in features. You need to find a host that you are comfortable with, if you’re just starting out then you need a web host with an easy to use control panel, almost every host has a demo of the control panel they use, make sure to check it out and are comfortable using it, if you’re not eliminate that web host. After checking out the control panel you may want to look at the stuff that you get with your account. Some examples are SQL databases, free scripts, forums, shopping carts. It’s safe to eliminate a host that doesn’t give you a single MySQL database for free. Free scripts such as forums and shopping carts are great, when you’re up to this point and have several companies to choose the one that gives you a better value i.e. more scripts, disk space.

You’re almost done finding the ONE web host that suits you, you have by this point eliminated many web hosts and are probably left with about 3 to 5 (hopefully). Now is a good time to check how well their support functions, and what other customers are saying about this web host. The first place to check is the companies forums (if they have them, my company doesn’t). Take a look at what the customers are asking, and look at the responses staff are giving, there may be some complaints on the forums as well. The next place to check is a site like TalkWebHosts, WebHostingTalk, or httpTalk, these sites are a bridge between web hosting companies, their clients, and their potential clients. You can find out almost anything about a company by visiting such forums, some important things to look for are the complaints, and the reviews. The reviews will usually mention how fast the support turnaround is some companies may offer 24/7 support however they may not deliver. Complaints often include things such as “Company XYZ is always down, my website only works an hour a day”. If a company only has a few complaints but many good reviews then it’s probably safe to sign up with them.

At this point you probably eliminated another company or two and you’re almost ready to purchase, now is a good time to look at the terms of service of the company, any refund policies, and guarantees. Some companies may sell your information, or even have the right to your first born but without reading the TOS you won’t know. Next take a look at the refund policy if the company has one. Some companies offer 15 Refunds, 30, 60, 91. The next thing to look at is an uptime guarantee most will advertise some number between 99% and 100% (like 99.88889%) (yes I’ve seen such a number before) one thing to keep in mind is that some companies may just refund you for the downtime, and some may refund the whole month, so take a look into that, this should allow you to eliminate another company.

With about two companies left now you should think of how well the host can grow with you, if they give you room to expand, or give you ways to make some money. If you can’t grow with the host then more than likely you’ll have to look for another one sooner or later (hopefully using my guide again).

After all this eliminating is done you are now left with your one ideal host, (if less than one go a few steps back, if more than one, start at the beginning of the guide). It’s now safe to fill out the order form. Although this step is optional but recommended, make a post on one of the forums giving your first impression of the company, and let everyone know that you used this guide to find your one ideal web host.

If you have any questions about my guide or would like to ask me some questions feel free to email me, or if you have AIM my screen name is p0nchic.


Good Luck with your new web host!

Originally posted by wanga
Finding a Web Host Guide

Next you may want to check pings and trace routes; basically this will show you the health of the network of your potential web host.



I totally disagree with this statement. Search this very forum as well as google, etc. if you need to obtain more info on the subject. Many, MANY hosts now disable ICMP packets on the servers. :confused:
While forums etc. may give added info for someone looking for hosting they do need to specifically email ANY potential host directly with pre-sales questions. A check by company name on google.com would be helpful too.
..thats my cater cents.. :D

Thanks for this guide. It does help, although I am still looking for more specific info on how to guage what I need for space, bandwith, scripts, etc, as I grow. I am still quite the newbie. My big gripe is the lack of support methods; I have been going through a tedious email/ticket system with my host in Australia. They got great reviews last year when I started with them, but their service has gone way downhill...no longer an 800 number, and response time has more than quadrupled to every email or ticket i put in over the year. So I am now in the market for a new company, and I will look in the US for sure after reading this article, and also because a long-distance call in the US is a lot less than one to Australia.

Great initial post about what how to narrow down your list of potential hosts. As yousay, there are millions of hosting companies out there. I'm fairly new to all of this and am currently spending my hours researching the whole process. What I would really like to know, is where to get an initial list of reasonable hosts from?

Many thanks!

That list would be mighty long. You might try a search for reviews of particular hosts.

Ok - I started by going through similar websites and doing a whois search, but not too fruitful. Other than just researching the top ten that show up in Google, do you have any suggestions where to look?
Thanks

An idea: You can look at signatures of members of this board with a significant amount of posts...Many of them may offer hosting and the sheer fact they are here gives you two advantages:

A) They are in this forum which offers good chance that someone might have checked them out already (and believe me,some people in here do serious checking)

B) They can be also reached through this forum ,which is very good!

Lol, that list alone made my head spin!

that list alone made my head spin

That list would be mighty long. You might try a search for reviews of particular hosts.

Hello, I am a webhosting company owner and I am looking to list my site on most of the top rated review sites.

Can you give me an idealized top 10 list of review sites where I may list my site?

Thanks for the great info....this is another great tool to use in my research.

Happy to help Ron!

A trace route tells you how many computers you have to go through to get to your webhost, once again, the lower the amount of hops (computers) the better.

eh - There are cases where there a ton of hops, yet very fast speed (still).

There isn't a direct correlation as you say. The more important thing is the actual transfer speed, that's the bottom line. If you have high transfer speed - you really don't have to worry about ping and traceroute.

Thats true... Also good post btw interesting and useful!

If ones main concern is transfer speed then yes, others are more concerned about initial connection times.

great guide thanks for the good info

Very nice post! I enjoyed it!

Thanks for the info f9-Gene. I recently changed providers because I was paying so much for quality service that I could not possibly become profitable, but it was a little nerve wracking moving over to a new provider. So far it's working out with the new one, but they did have to reboot the server I was on only after a few days. Hopefully it will stay smooth now. I don't want to have to migrate everything again.

misterdmc
webmaster
http://123hostingsolutions.com

I'm glad that the guide helped.

f9-Gene: "If ones main concern is transfer speed then yes, others are more concerned about initial connection times."

yes, indeed. usually a site has to show pages not push files to download. for small files (few Megs) you dont care too much but if have a lot of visitors and a lot of data on download you probably would want to set few sites and redirect them to the closest one.

a fast page load makes a good impression on your visitors - this is a well known thing.

a fast page load makes a good impression on your visitors Bingo. My point exactly.

To begin all at first certainly happens very difficultly so-as we lose both time and nerves :)
And it is very bad when you trust the company and suddenly you find that they not so good as you think :( With me too such there was, also I understand you.

Thanks for the very informative guidelines.

I would like to add.. in my opinion, avoid "unlimited plans". These plans include unlimited disk space, bandwidth etc. First of all there's no such thing in the market as unlimited hard drive, while it is possible for a host to have an 'unmetered' connection to the internet but it is still not unlimited in the true sense of word. Although the host provider may not meter the bandwidth, the host is still very much limited by the speed of connection., it makes it even less unlimited, and not a very accurate picture of what is being advertised.

Many companies use various 'unlimited hosting gimmicks'. It doesn't mean that the company is necessarily bad but you just need to approach those offers with caution. Typically, hosts who offer such unlimited space are grossly overselling their servers, which inevitably causes problems in the long run. But hey! im not saying that those people are bad people or that they don't know what they're doing. I believe setting reasonable limits is far better way running a hosting company for a long term.

And another important point. Has any hosting company talked about the "Success" of their clients? Providing excellent customer service is great, cpanel tools, autopilot etc. Some offer a few success stories.. nice-looking sites with stunning Flash animations etc. but with dismal traffic rankings. Every major small business Web hosting solution offers a variation on the Cheap-Quick-&-Easy theme. Be ready for it. Recognize it.

Hope I made a good contribution, this is my first post =] Hope I can make more posts here. This is a great forum!

Hi Martie,

I totally disagree with this statement. Search this very forum as well as google, etc. if you need to obtain more info on the subject. Many, MANY hosts now disable ICMP packets on the servers
I'm not sure what you mean by this statement. I just pinged and did tracerts on 6 different web host companies and got clear results on each one.
The companies I pinged and did tracerts on were Blue Host, HostMonster, Hostgator, Yahoo, Angelfire, 1&1 and lunarpages. Blue Host reeturned the best results BTW.

Is it possible to get ping results even if they disable ICMP packets?

I'd also like to add that testing the speed of a web host's servers can be difficult without pinging or running a tracert because the rate at which you receive websites is partly determined by the speed of your computer.