In the years that I have been paying for web hosting service I have learned to interrogate possible hosts with my essential questions before I sign up and I encourage you to do the same. Not only will you get valuable information to help you make your decision, but you’ll also learn a lot about the speed and quality of response to customer enquiries, which is one of the most important factors in becoming a happy web hosting client.

Web Hosting Service 6 Pre-Sale Questions

1.) Backups? – Ask about what is backed up you want to hear that all files and databases are backed up, not just files or just databases. The next question is the frequency of the backups. Daily is best, weekly may be acceptable if you don’t update you site too often. Where are the backups located? Off-site backups are best. If the hosting company burns down, having your backups sitting next to the main server is not going to help you get your site back online.

2.) Data Center Location? – Avoid hosting with companies that have their datacenter in areas that are subject to extremes of weather or are politically unstable. Look closely to find this info, since a company can have its offices in a different location than its datacenter. Ask if you are unable to find the datacenter location on the website.

3.) Phone Support? – Is there a support phone number on the website? If not, find another web hosting service. If there is call the number and ask a couple routine questions from this list. If you get an answering machine and are told to leave your information, imagine it being the busiest day of your sites history and it goes down, are you going to be okay with not getting a human on the line?

4.) Testimonials? – Can you find the name and websites of other sites that host with this company? Do a search on Google for the “web hosting company name” testimonial to see what others have said. Keep in mind that you you’ll likely find negative customers for the best hosting service on the web, so look for patterns rather than specifics.

5.) Crowded Servers? – Ask how many sites do they put on each server? If you found one or more testimonials from number 4 you can do a whois lookup at whois.sc and find out the number of sites on the server. Again this can be deceiving, but if you do the research for a few web hosting services, you’ll find this a useful way to compare them.

6.) Patch Management? – How current are their software installations? What version of PHP are they using? Find out and then go to php.net and check the current stable version. If the web hosting service has Fantastico then see what version of WordPress they are installing. Since WordPress updates regularly it is a good measure of how well the hosting company stays on top of their patching regime.

While this is not a completely exhaustive list of factors that determine the quality of a hosting service, it is a quick and useful way to avoid the most common causes of problems when choosing a web hosting company.