What are some of the kinds of questions that i should ask of a hosting company before I sign up with them? I've been burned twice in a row b/c I did not do the right homework. I just don't want to get burned again.

Thanks,
Sean :uhh:

Find one with a 30 day money back garentee:)

I tried that and went with Gearhost, but they never responded to my emails.

Sean

Try asking the host a few questions by email and see what the response time is.

Do they have a money back guarantee?
Do they have a helpdesk?

Ask them for a fe resellers for references.

If they are a good host, you will get the references and they will reply telling you about the host.

Ask the resellers how long they have been with them, and how has their experience with the host been, who is the support teams response times, etc... a newbie referral is nothing compaired to ones that have been there a while.

ALSO:
writting support to see how they respond before your a customer is not always going to give you a good idea of how they respond. Many support teams only deal with active customers. So e-mail the right email address to contact the person in charge, or the owner of the company, and ask for otehr resellers that they host. Get real info from their resellers.

Tim L

Agree with Paul about the email test. Before I was directed to this forum I was asking questions about different issues with the provider ( :puke: reseller matrix). I discovered that I didn't want to do business with them from the responses.

Are they timely? Are they courteous? Do they answer the questions that you ask (really!)? Although you need to understand that sales response time will be less prompt than support turnaround time would be, they need to be helpful and courteous. For me, a turnaround of of a few hours is fine for sales inquiries. Quicker the better of course because it indicates the level of support available.

Most providers have been very prompt and courteous (aside from the aforementioned "reseller") ;)

Read the forum, take your time and you will make the right decision. :)

Dave

This is what i came up with. Is there anything else?

Potential Host Questions....

1) What type of company are you? Ie. Corporation, LLC, etc.

2) What type of software do you have installed on your servers (like cpanel, WHM, etc.)

3) Where could I see a demo of these programs

4) Could I charge the user to access any of these programs?

5) Do you have SSL connections? Would they be under my domain name or yours?

6) Are we allowed to install and apache compile modules on the server?

7) Are we allowed to install and perl compile modules on the server?

8) If there is a problem with the cpanel licensing or software, how
should it be corrected, such as resetting the license, resetting the
shopping cart and so.

9) What if an emergency arrives, not forgetting the fact that, we do
not have physical access to your systems, whom should we contact?
someone who has physical access to the systems.

10) Do you allow mysql access from a remote machine?

11) Do you allow users to run server and client programs (Even with the
user permissions). however efficient it would be?