July 1, 2008 – 11:16 am
Ok, so I know there are loads of posts out there about this kind of thing, but I still wanted to add my 2 cents.
So we’re a web host, and yes we know, there is loads, loads, of competition out there, but to be honest, we don’t really consider most of the smaller web hosts a threat to our business at this stage; our service is good and we believe in it. We also read so many horror stories about startup web hosts who don’t know the first thing about server administration, and who get hacked… quickly!
Which leads me nicely into this post; what should you look for when selecting a web hosting partner?
Well, lets start with the obvious things:
1. You need a web host who performs regular security updates to their servers (Windows or Linux), don’t be afraid to ask about their security policy. Don’t expect exact details about what they do, but do expect them to be able to give you an idea of how they manage security. For example, do they regularly update their servers, are they running a firewall, do they have intrusion detection, do they have rootkit detection software. Those are all questions you should expect to have yes answers to, but don’t expect anyone to tell you what software their using.
2. Are the servers physically located in your country? It’s reasonably common knowledge that Google ranks websites more highly if the server they are on is physically based in the same country as the searcher. So if you’re based in the UK and you’re targetting UK customers, ideally your server ought to be located in the UK too. Perhaps more importantly, the nearer your server is to you and your target audience, the faster it ought to respond.
3. Do they have server monitoring software? A good host should, and they should be able to tell you what their uptime record is.
4. Are they a re-seller? I guess some people might not be overly honest about this, but in my opinion you don’t really want to choose a re-seller. Why? because they rarely have any control over their servers. For example one of our contacts is a reseller for one of the big UK web hosts, if they have a problem with a server, they literally have to get on the phone and wait for their web host to sort things out. This is a poor service compared to a web host who can take the call, get onto the server immediately and sort things out.
5. Do they allow CRON jobs / Scheduled tasks? If your website needs any processes to run automatically you need this facility. Many of the bigger web hosts don’t allow you to use CRON jobs, I have no idea why! The only thing I can think of is that they’re worried the server could be overloaded with badly run scripts. But, we’re able to prevent out of control scripts wrecking havoc, so why can’t they?
6. Do they allow you to use server directives in an .htaccess file? Vital for search engine optimisation! You need to be able to set up things like 301 redirects, otherwise when you change domains, how will Google know?
7. Are they able to tell you what hardware they’re using? We can, why can’t they? (FYI we’ve just bought lovely Quad Core Intel Xeon Server for our shared hosting platform, nice :-))
8. Do they offer backups? Do they have RAID? If they don’t have either, what are they going to do when their hard drive fails? If it dies, all your data dies with it.
I guess that’ll do for now, I’m sure I’ve got many more things to add to this list, but I hope someone finds it useful.
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