Web site hosting FAQ > page 6

Is there really any difference between hosting companies?

Most definitely. Hosting companies seem to be about as similar to one another as fingerprints. If you're not looking very closely, they would all appear to be the same.

When you take a good close look though, comparing various Web site hosting companies, you'll find that there are many differences between them.

Here are some of the features that you should compare:

1. Customer satisfaction.
2. Access to support staff.
3. Site loading speed.
4. Package options.

1.  Customer satisfaction.
This one is obvious - examine the host's site, and see if you can locate a list of current customers. If you can, write an email to the Web master of these sites and ask if they're happy with the hosting provider. If you can't find a list of customers, try doing a search at google.com for "hosted by hostname" (replace 'hostname' with the name of the hosting company). Now check through the list of sites that are returned to you... and see what kind of satisfied/unsatisfied remarks you can locate.

2.  Access to support staff.
Make sure that the hosting provider has some way for you to contact a real live person to answer the questions that you are sure to have. This could be via an online form, email, or by telephone. If all they have available for 'support' is online documentation, this is probably not going to be enough. Look for mention of an online, realtime, system status indicator. A number of hosting companies have made available a feature that displays the current and historical 'uptime' status of the various servers and services that they maintain.

Note:
Just because they don't provide telephone support does not mean they do not provide good support. Often with telephone support, you can be left on hold for too long because the ten people ahead of you had some really silly, frivolous questions that they could have answered for themselves had they only read the information on the Web site!

3.  Site loading speed.
How quickly does the Web hosting company's own site load?
How quickly do the sites hosted by that company load?
This is probably what you can expect if you choose to have your site hosted by this Web hosting company. If you find that the pages take a long time to load, and you find that you're waiting, ask yourself - "Is this what I want the visitors to my site to experience?".

4.  Package options.
These are some of the various items that you'll want to compare in packages from different Web hosting companies.

• Disk space
• Traffic charges
• E-mail accounts
• Is there a 'control panel' available?
• Sub domains
• Shell users
• User accounts
• Site backup
• Cgi-bin access
• Frontpage extensions
• Database usage
• SSL availability (secure socket layer)
• Unlimited ftp access
• Telnet / SSH access
• Java, PHP, Perl, SQL availability
• Packaged cgi scripts

Yes, there are a lot of possible options to look for!
The trick is to know what features you require, and don't pay for more than you need. If your needs change, most decent hosting companies will allow you to add certain features to your account, or allow you to upgrade to a 'bigger' package.

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