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Guide to Choosing Reliable Web Hosting
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All the marketing, branding, and promotional strategy in the world will not be worth anything if your site is frequently inaccessible because you failed to get reliable web hosting when you started. So if you’re serious about creating an online presence, you need to hit the ground running, and the first thing you need to consider is getting reliable web hosting.
It can be very difficult as the reliability of cannot be quantified using numbers, and claims from the companies themselves should be taken with a grain of salt. So if you’re on the market for reliable web hosting and you don’t know where to start, you may want to follow these tips:
Weed Out the Obvious Liars
If something is too good to be true, it usually is. This include sites that promise 100% uptime. A 100% uptime is virtually impossible, as servers need some downtime due to regular updates, patching of software, and maintenance – that’s not even counting the fact that accidents can happen. The best that providers can shoot for is 99.9%. In fact, even 99.99% is suspicious. It is best to look at these uptime guarantees with a suspicious eye, and to use them as jumping off point for the other tips below.
Look at Their History
The longer they’ve been in the business, the easier it is to look up their history with a simple online search. Disgruntled former customers will usually make it known if they have been unsatisfied with a host – these are readily available online. It is best to look for negative reviews first, as people who are not having problems with a host are not very vocal, and there’s also a chance that overly positive reviews are fake or commissioned. It is best to look for the bad reviews or complaints, and judge them based on how small the numbers are (or at the complete lack thereof).
Test Their Claims
You can easily check out the websites of people who are using a specific hosting company’s services. Check if the webmasters are happy, and you can do some snooping around from the user’s perspective: if the site is very slow or frequently down, even though the website layouts are not too heavy on elements, then it could be a sign that the host itself has performance problems.
Check Out Their Packages
Some hosting services are a bit two-faced, in the sense that they offer cheap packages, but provide poor service while also offering great service to customers who go for the more expensive plans. This is usually seen by looking at their plans: do they have expensive, high end packages while also offering dirt-cheap ones? This can be a sign. If you find this on a host, go back to the previous tip and try to research the experiences of their other customers.
Look for Free Trial Periods or Money-Back Guarantees
Web hosting companies that are reliable tend to offer free trial periods and money-back guarantee, and it has become a sort of de facto industry standard. Be wary of companies that don’t offer either one, as it is a sign that they are not confident with their ability to provide reliable web hosting.
Tags: hosting tips
