May 21, 2005

Business Web Hosting - an other approach to find the right hosting company

You have a business, and now you want your website hosted somewhere, and you of course look around on the internet with a search engine and you find zillions of web pages that want to sell you business webhosting, and they all try to look better then the rest. Web hosting seems to be big business, allthough the prices nowadays are low.

I have been looking at becoming a reseller myself, but with these prices and the kind of service I would like to give, it to me seems too much work for too little money. But other people seem to think different about (re)selling webhosting.

But I have been thinking how I would go about in trying to find the right web hosting company, and I would like to share this with you. Please bare with me, but you will need to do some work….

The first results in the search eninges seem to be sites that make a living by selling others business web hosting plans. I didn’t immidiatly trusted those companies. Afterall it is easy to become a “web hosting” company. You buy a nice looking hosting web template, you apply for a reseller account, and off you go. You can be a web host in half a day, looking like you have been in business for years.

None the less, you have to start somewhere, so there you have all those blinking banners shining at you, and you click. Now how to check the reputation and quality of such a web host? If you look on the search engines for “web hosting review” or someting similar you again find plenty of web sites that want to sell you something, there is not so much objectivity there. You may find on some user forums some more objectivity.

How to find a quality web hosting company for your business:

Step 1: If you look at a web site of a web hosting company, see if they use their company name in the title of their web page. If they do, that’s a good point, then they are not afraid that their business is found on the internet by their company name.

Step 2: Use this company name and keywords like “complaints”, “service”, “problems” and all other keywords that may say something about this web host and search the internet. If you find nothing bad about this hoster continue with the next step.

Step 3: Objective background information you can find by doing research on the domain name of the web host. The domain record should show you their location, contact details and important, how long they have this website that shows you their business. Look at the email addresses and DNS entries of the domain record. Do the email addresses listed in the records belong to the same domain? Does the DNS belong to the hosting company ? If both answers are no, you probably are dealing with a reseller, wich doesn’t not have to be bad, but I think a quality web hosting company should have it all under their own control. If the email addresses don’t fit with the domain, take a look at the domains that belong to those email addresses, who are they?

An easy way to find things out about a domain is this webpage: http://www.dnsstuff.com/

Step 4: Call them if possible, do they have live help, online of off line? Try it out.

Of course you need to check if they provide the services you need, back-up, database hosting, php or mysql etc, but I think the things I described above will help you a bit to find the right host for you site. After all, moving a website from one to another web host is allways a big hassle.

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