Building a Checklist
Before you even go looking for somewhere to host your site, you really need a way that you can rate and score any hosting companies that you are interested in. Of course, before you can do that, you'll need to have a good idea on what hosting account features your future host should offer. This is where a checklist of every feature you are looking for and questions to ask comes in very handy.
Preparing a checklist before searching for a new host can save you both time and money in the longer term; it makes you prioritize the various features of your site, which is handy when you have a low budget or you have to make compromises. The rest of this hosting guide should help you to prepare a checklist of features tailored to your particular sites needs or expected future potential; regardless whether you know the type of hosting features you are looking for!
Once you have compiled your checklist you will be able to assess much more quickly if the host is particularly suitable for your site. Since there are many hosts fighting for your attention and hard earned cash, you'll probably find yourself referring to your checklist frequently during your research (it would be silly to host your site with the first host that matched your criteria considering the vast number of hosts out there).
Rating the Hosts
Once you have put your checklist of features together, you can then use it to help you rate each of the hosts. Exactly how you go about doing this will depend how important each of the features on your checklist are to you. If you have sorted your checklist of features in order of importance then you can simply award points on a sliding scale, 1 point for the least important thing, 2 for the next least important etc. If the host has a feature, those points are added to the final score.
Here is a short snippet of some of the features that I personally look for in a host.
- Support for PHP (least important)
- User Control Panel
- Site Statistics
- Support for ASP and Perl
- Price below £10 a month (most important)
When I visit potential hosts I compare the features available with my checklist. The example scoring system shown above will favor the cheapest hosts first because the cost is important to me seeing how it is only for a hobby site. If I was looking for a host to host a business site, then the cost would not be as important (as the quality would now be more important) and the host with all the features I was looking for will get a better score.
The sliding scale is probably the easiest way that you can convert your checklist into a score or rating, but it is by no means the only way. If you have two or more features that are equally important, then you can give them all the same scores; the example shown here is only for illustration, don't feel you must use a checklist or give scores or ratings to hosts - but it does making sorting out the more useful ones much easier.
Remember, you get what you pay for.
It's a sad but true fact of life that many of us that have very small hosting budgets have to live with. While there are hosts out there that can offer a rather tempting deal at pocket money prices, you should not expect such hosts to offer the kinds of guarantees that come with similar but more costly packages. If your site is going to be important to your business or livelihood, do yourself a favor and look upon your hosting as an investment rather than a cost. The extra cash helps to pay for things like infrastructure, back ups and security; so if anything does go wrong you will be in a better position to do something about it.
Using a checklist is a good way of sorting out the most likely hosts to offer the kind of hosting you are looking for; but there is no substitute for doing that extra bit of research in the newsgroups and on the message boards once you have your short list. The best people who will know how a host is performing will be the customers themselves; unfortunately they can be quite hard to track down at times. Having said that, it shouldn't be too hard to find a host you should avoid; since most unhappy customers like to share their experiences with likeminded individuals.