Your web hosting provider could make or break your business – especially if you are heavily reliant on web services. With full control of your data and your front end applications, a web hosting provider should offer you the best service possible; otherwise, you are at risk of losing clients, data or both.
If your site is known for being unreliable, visitors will simply not come. If they come and have their personal and financial information stolen you, could end up facing a hefty lawsuit and even doing time behind bars. You, therefore, owe yourself and, more importantly, your clients – who trust you with their data – the courtesy of making sure you have a very reliable hosting provider.
So, what are the signs that you are doing business with an unreliable hosting provider? Let’s have a look at a dozen of them:
- Your online business is expected to run around the clock. This means your hosting provider is expected to give you support 24 hours a day. You should be able to get hold of them whenever you require it and not just when something goes wrong. Round-the-clock support has almost become an industry standard and you shouldn’t settle for anything less.
- Better Business Bureau (BBB) ratings matter. You can take a business’ ratings as a grade of how good or bad it is at what it does. Check it out and then go look at online reviews from the general public. You should be able to get a sense of how good or bad your provider is. Consumer-Rankings has a ton of reviews on pretty much every notable hosting provider out there.
- If your site is on a shared web server a WHOIS search can show you information about your site and the other ones that are hosted with it. If any of them (the other sites) are porn or sites with illegal content on them, your IP address could be blocked by ISP’s and security software like anti-viruses. It also doesn’t do much good to your company’s reputation that your site sits next to an X-rated site.
- Check the provider’s certifications, licenses and qualifications. You can find the minimum requirements by doing a simple online research. Compare the search results with what your provider has to offer, if they don’t meet them, then they may not be good enough for you.
- While you’re at it, have a look at their uptime records. Anything less than 98% is not acceptable.
- Slow bandwidth is annoying to your visitors and clients and bad for your business. On average, people won’t give you more than 10 seconds of their time while they glance at your page to decide if they will stay or move on – you can’t afford wasting that critical time on slow page loading times.
- Compare the features you have been offered with those of competing companies; at the very least you should have a comparable number of them for the same price. If not, you might be paying too much for too little.
- Switching hosting packages shouldn’t be too complicated an affair. In fact, one of the main selling points of a good hosting provider is its ease of scalability. If you find yourself in the middle of a mess every time you upgrade to a new package or have a new feature added, you’re probably not getting the service you deserve.
- Look into the number of servers they have in operation. You don’t want to be dealing with a fly-by-night outfit or a guy working out of his parents’ basement. In fact, if you can, have a look at their physical location – you don’t have to gain access to their server room, but you can find out if they at least have a decent office complex with a known address. Make phone calls to see what kind of service you can expect.
- Another good sign would be the number of separate locations their servers are located in. A good hosting provider makes sure its servers are in locations far apart from one another for safety and redundancy purposes – sometimes countries and even continents apart.
- Go through your contract with a fine tooth comb and a microscope. It isn’t uncommon for rogue businesses to hide escape clauses deep in legalese. If you have one, let your legal team have a look at it. Make sure that if you were to choose to terminate the contract you get to do so with all of your data returned, or transferred to a new hosting provider, without any hassles or pre-conditions.
- And then of course there is the matter of price. Web hosting is becoming cheaper almost by the day. Today there are amazing hosting packages that will only cost you a couple of dollars a month and that’s not even considering the freebies they thrown in when you sign up for a longer time. Do not be fooled by all the bells and whistles they promise you. Compare what you are getting with that of competing businesses to see if you can’t get a better deal.
If you see too many of the signs mentioned above, don’t hesitate – move your site today.
