Nowadays, hosting services are offered by many different companies. Therefore, before making a choice of a hosting provider, you need to conduct extensive research work. There are a lot of questions that can be asked to the company by the hoster – in this article we give only the most important ones.
1. WHEN IS TECHNICAL SUPPORT AVAILABLE?
If you are going to work on your site in the evening or on weekends, then you need to make sure that the technical support of the hosting provider will be available to you. And the question concerns not only e-mail correspondence – sometimes you need to get an answer as soon as possible (well, at least for two hours). Look at what the hosting provider says about the time it takes for technical support to work and see if its approval works. Try using the chat on Saturday or call the support team late at night. Good hosting providers fulfill their promises. This is the first rule when choosing a hosting provider.
2. WHAT IS THE SAFETY LEVEL?
Does the web hosting provider have its own data center or does it lease the premises together with other companies? How are servers monitored? Do you have enough resources for backup? Is the firewall used? The security of web hosting and its choice these days is becoming an increasingly important role for your business.
3. CAN YOU SAVE YOUR DOMAIN NAME?
An important part when starting your site is choosing a domain name. It should be easy to remember by your customers / visitors. As soon as you pick up a suitable domain name available for you, you need to make sure that you can save it even after changing the hosting provider once. Make sure that this option is available.
4. WHAT TYPE OF CONTRACT DO YOU SIGN?
Signing a contract for several years can help you save some money, so these options have always attracted site owners. But in this case it is necessary to check the policy of refusal from hosting services. Is the long-term guarantee of a refund sufficient? Will you pay penalties if the hoster can not offer you suitable conditions and you will be forced to switch to a service in another company? Find out all the nuances before making a choice of hosting provider.
5. WHAT PASSAGE OF TRANSPORT AND HOW MUCH IS THE DISK SPACE PROPOSED?
Many providers offer unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. Excellent, but in most cases, such luxury is hardly needed. An average site can use approximately 50 MB; 100 MB will be an excellent option for site growth. All that you receive from above is superfluous, unless, of course, you are assuming an explosive growth in the attendance and popularity of your projects.
6. WHAT INSTRUMENTS ARE AVAILABLE?
There is a huge amount of excellent free software that can greatly facilitate the site’s maintenance. Leading companies supply their customers with everything necessary for building, developing and supporting the site. Make sure that the control panel is simple and easy to use (see the demo materials, if available) that you have multimedia or commercial applications that you plan to use in your project.
7. IS THERE ANY ADDITIONAL PAYMENTS?
Check for additional hidden fees that may be required for support, use of commercial scripts or additional email addresses. Hosting providers should honestly and openly report such facts. And if something is hidden, then it’s better to choose a hosting provider for another site.
Of course, depending on your project, you may need answers to other questions. For example, about the optimization of code, about special functions for SEO, about some necessary services. But in this article, we listed the mandatory questions that should be answered before selecting a hosting provider.