Basic Tips for Hosting »

1) The first and most obvious step is to have some idea of what your basic needs are before going 'shopping'. Often times you will come across a web host that is offering some great deal or promotion that may look like the answer to your prayers but in truth may be totally unsuitable for your needs. For instance there is no point in signing up for latest and greatest e-commerce site hosting when all you want is a simple blog - no matter how cheap it seems at the time. More often than not once the promotional period is over the price will revert back to their normal charges and you will be paying for something that you do not need or will ever use.

2) A subject that comes up time and time again in the web hosting forums is customer support. This can be the difference between a great host and an absolute nightmare! Even if you have been given a recommendation from someone take the time to do a simple 'Google' of their company name and read what people are saying about them. They might have the cheapest hosting plan around with the most features but if you can't get any help when things turn pear-shaped life can be very hard. Look for a hosting company that offers 24/7 customer support with either email or a toll free phone number.

3) Unlimited this, unlimited that. A lot of the 'cheaper' web hosts offer plans which allow unlimited bandwidth or unlimited addon domains etc etc. Although these plans may be suitable for the majority of webmasters what they are in fact doing is over-selling the amount of space on their servers. What this can mean is that if you are pulling in great amounts of traffic or have a whole boat load of sites to host you may run in to some problems with server response and site down time as the server that they have you on is literally overloaded. For the majority of us this very rarely becomes an issue but it is something that should be kept in mind.

Although looking around for the best web hosting may seem a tad daunting if you take the time to educate yourself on exactly what it is that you need great savings can be made!

Main Tips for Web Hosting »

1) Never rely on one or two pieces of advice when purchasing hosting services. Aside from the fact that people may not really know what they're talking about, nothing replaces decent research when choosing a web host. Some unscrupulous hosting companies even resort to joining forums under pseudonyms and then giving their own services glowing testimonials to con unsuspecting potential customers.

2) Never rely on a web host which can't even automate or administer the most important aspect of a business: billing and payments!

3) Never ever rely on a web host which has "mysterious" outages frequently, always promising that it is "just a glitch". Your website relies on a smooth and consistent presence on the Internet to be successful. Would you frequent a supermarket or a bookstore which had odd trading hours and/or which regularly closed down without any word of why? Unreliable web hosts can cause irreparable damage to your website's traffic. Of course if you actually earn revenue from your site, this can be even worse - you will lose income, sometimes for days a time, and you won't be able to do a thing about it since the web hosting company controls if and when your site comes back online.

4) If your host goes down for more than 24 hours, start getting very worried. This is not normal, and if you have had no warning, and no explanation, it is even worse. At this point start shopping for another webhost immediately.

5) If you do receive a story about why your site is down, try to corroborate it with other people on the same host. Use the WebHostingTalk Forums for example to search for and/or post a question on whether the web host is down and why. Don't trust the web host to tell you the truth about the situation, and don't just sit and wait.

6) Once your site is down for several or more days, don't wait - switch your host. Simply put, if your web host hasn't taken steps to protect against long outages by having appropriate emergency backup systems, then you need to get away from them ASAP.

7) Always back up your website regularly to your own PC. I made daily backups of every page, picture and file I uploaded to my site onto my hard drive, so my backup was literally up-to-date and readily accessible.

8) Never register your domain name through your web host. This is the single biggest problem Oktagone customers ran into. Those that had also purchased their domain name through Oktagone couldn't switch to another web host with their existing domain names. This meant that some sites were down for a week or two or more with no recourse whatsoever.

9) Never pay in advance for hosting more than one year in starting of the taking hosting services, even if it entails a large discount. You may find you lose all your money if/when the host goes down forever, and/or if they decide simply not to refund you. Consumer protection agencies may help you recover your money, but for small sums below a few hundred dollars you're going to spend more money trying than the amount you'd ever get back. Pay for your hosting by the month, and do it through a Credit Card so you can always cancel the payment if need be, or turn to the Credit Card company's fraud protection mechanisms to prevent losing large amounts of money.

10) Don't wait until something bad happens - if you're not happy with your current host, start researching for a better host straight away. Even if you decide to stay with your current host, at least you will have some options in case some emergency comes up and you have to switch at short notice. Never make the decision in a pressure situation as you're likely to just switch to another poor quality host.