How to choose a good hosting for a decent site

    Choosing a hosting service is also like choosing a wife:
    before the wedding, she is one, after the wedding - she is different
    and, most importantly, someone else’s is always better!
    (Drug)

    The number of companies providing hosting services according to the largest Russian-language catalog of hosting providers hostobzor.ru as of 04/20/2011 is more than 1000, with a great deal of confidence I can say that this is only a small part.

    What kind of company should a user choose to host his site out of thousands. How to find the one that suits him.

    A lot of articles have already been written on this topic on the Internet and I have heard many theories, ranging from the fact that you only need to choose a company with its own data center and ending with the fact that you need to choose a company that does not have the word "host" in the name. Personally, I can argue with both theories.

    I do not pretend to the truth in the final instance, but, nevertheless, having made a full path from the consumer of hosting services to the owner of such a company, I have some experience. So, I will try to give some recommendations that can be verified in one way or another.

    Let's start by debunking some of the most popular myths:


    1) Reseller is bad.
    It’s not necessary at all, there are quite a few large companies that started their business precisely with reselling. And since the reseller, as a rule, has hundreds of times fewer customers than large companies, they usually pay more attention to them.

    2) If there is a round-the-clock support , then this is definitely a cool office. Of course, very few companies can afford qualified round-the-clock support, but dozens, if not hundreds of companies, claim it. What is the matter? Often in such companies, an extramural student sits in night support, who only knows what to turn on / off. Inside companies, such a post is jokingly called a “quick-foot-rezonatazhitel”.

    3) The faster ping - the faster my site will load. Very often, users try to determine the speed of hosting by measuring the ping to the hosting server. A lot of articles have already been written on this subject, so "I will be brief." In reality, ping does not reflect the real loading speed of your sites; for an objective assessment of the speed, you need to consider a number of other parameters, including server load. And if you are hosting a non-gaming project, then any hoster with a ping of less than 100 ms is quite suitable for you.

    What to look for when choosing a hosting?


    I will clarify that below we will no longer talk about technical issues, but rather organizational ones.

    So:
    1) Form of ownership of the company : at least the company must be officially registered as a state of emergency (IP) or LLC. Someone will say that, they say LLC is better and more reliable, since it is more difficult to register a small company, I do not agree. Firstly, the process of registering an LLC is now possible for anyone who has at least 2000-3000 UAH. (250-375 dollars) in your pocket. And secondly, if the LLC is responsible, in which case, with its authorized capital, the minimum amount of which is now equal to one minimum wage, then the FOP is responsible for all its property.

    In addition, many, even large hosting companies in Ukraine still work as FOP, simply because it is easier.

    2) The presence of an office . If the website of the hosting company contains only the email address from the details, then: either this is the next company created by the schoolchild, which, as a rule, lasts a maximum of 2 years, or the company is so young that it has not even earned the rent of a small office.

    In addition, it is always more pleasant when you have the opportunity to come to the office and chat live with people for whom you pay money.

    I must note that in the case of young companies consisting of 1-2 people there are exceptions and there is a small chance to get to people who love their work, who can stand out among hundreds of competitors and continue to exist in 2 years, but the likelihood of such a development is extremely low .

    Hosting business is an extremely difficult market, with a lot of competition and not the biggest profitability, now I would choose my job, not the fact that I would do the same, I just like it.

    3) BL Webmoney - if a company accepts payment including by webmoney, and in our company this payment method is in 1st place in popularity, then this indicator can approximately estimate how many customers the company has and how often they pay. Here we can say that BL> 100 can only be considered good, I have not seen a single one-day hosting company that would have such a level.

    You can check it by knowing the company’s WMID using the link of the form:
    passport.webmoney.ru/asp/certview.asp?wmid=NNN (where NNN is the WM identifier number)

    4) Domain registration dateWell, everything is simple here, we check through whois - if the domain is registered less than one year ago - then we seriously think about whether to contact.

    5) Reviews. Many start with searching for reviews about the company on the Internet, but I would say that this is the least reliable way to determine how good a particular hosting provider is. For several reasons: firstly, as practice shows, negative emotions are much more readily expressed by customers and if 5 out of 100 satisfied customers write at best that they feel good, then out of 100 dissatisfied people, 50 may well publicly express their dissatisfaction. As a result, there is a possibility that there may be more negative reviews about a good company in principle.

    On the other hand, even if there are a majority of positive reviews, this is also far from an indicator. Since often such reviews are written by the employees of the companies themselves, it is often very easy to determine them on the forum, as a rule, they are written on behalf of a user who has less than 5 posts on the forum, that is, a person registered just to leave a review.

    What reviews can be trusted?

    Not one hundred percent, but still trustworthy reviews on the hostobzor.ru site, if only for the reason that only the client who has the site at the moment on the hosting site about which he writes a review can publish a review (there is a technical limitation by ip address). Also, more or less, you can trust the reviews of people with great karma on the Habré or a good reputation on the heart.

    6) Tariff plans . Here I’ll just say that you should not chase the price, since the cheapest hosting is usually with “schoolchildren” who simply don’t know what else they can attract a client to, except for the price. And in the end, of course, you buy 50 GB of space, everything is unlimited for $ 1, but how it all works and what level of service you get is a big question.

    As a rule, having quickly gained a large number of customers, companies with a low cost of services are faced with a problem: they themselves are no longer able to properly serve as many customers. And there is still not enough money to hire an intelligent admin - as a result, clients, overloaded servers and answers to the question during the week endure.

    6) Payment methods: they can also tell us something about the company. For example, if a company does not accept payments by bank transfer, then one of the two or it does not work with organizations, or, most likely, it simply does not have a current account.

    As for the other payment methods, now the connection process to all payment gateways is very simple and accessible to everyone, except for connecting to payment terminals. Payment through payment terminals, if the company has declared such a payment option among others, then a large company is guaranteed to you. Since there are fewer companies with a client number of less than 1000 and low turnover, the operator simply will not connect - it is not profitable. But the opposite is also important here, the absence of such a payment method does not tell us that we have a sharashkin office in front of us. So far, only a few of the largest hosting companies provide the ability to pay through payment terminals.

    8) Company website- Well, everything is simple here, if the texts on the site are written with errors, the design was drawn with the left hind leg - run from such companies. Because for the host-site this is his main point of contact with the visitor and if he did not take care of a quality site, then what can we say about the rest.

    And again, exceptions to the rule, which rather confirms the rule. I know several sites of hosting companies whose design, to put it mildly, is not impressive, one has a template design, the other has minimal minimalism, only 1 page, but their level of service is quite decent.

    9) The availability of landline telephonea. Now it’s almost possible to ignore this, since getting a phone number is very simple, but it would be nice if the company had a direct city number, at least in the city in which it has an office.

    10) Ask how many clients the hoster hosts on the server , of course, a lot depends on the technologies and hardware configurations used, but in the general case, if the hoster does not use clusters and expensive servers, then it can be said that the number will be no more than 200-300 clients.

    PS The article was written with an eye to the Ukrainian hosting market, so some points are more relevant for Ukraine.

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