Eight tips for chosing right web host

1. Never rely on one or two pieces of advice when purchasing hosting services. Aside from the fact that people may not really know what they’re talking about, nothing replaces decent research when choosing a web host. Some unscrupulous hosting companies even resort to joining forums under pseudonyms and then giving their own services glowing testimonials to con unsuspecting potential customers
2. Never rely on a web host which can’t even automate or administer the most important aspect of a business: billing and payments!
3. Never ever rely on a web host which has “mysterious” outages frequently, always promising that it is “just a glitch”. Your website relies on a smooth and consistent presence on the Internet to be successful. Would you frequent a supermarket or a bookstore which had odd trading hours and/or which regularly closed down without any word of why? Unreliable web hosts can cause irreparable damage to your website’s traffic.
4. If your host goes down for more than 24 hours, start getting very worried. This is not normal, and if you have had no warning, and no explanation, it is even worse. At this point start shopping for another webhost immediately.
5. If you do receive a story about why your site is down, try to corroborate it with other people on the same host. Use Forums for example to search for and/or post a question on whether the web host is down and why. Don’t trust the web host to tell you the truth about the situation, and don’t just sit and wait.
6. Once your site is down for several or more days, don’t wait – switch your host. Simply put, if your web host hasn’t taken steps to protect against long outages by having appropriate emergency backup systems, then you need to get away from them ASAP.
7. Always back up your website regularly to your own PC. To avoid data loss due to negligence of the web host.
8. Don’t wait until something bad happens – if you’re not happy with your current host, start researching for a better host straight away. Even if you decide to stay with your current host, at least you will have some options in case some emergency comes up and you have to switch at short notice. Never make the decision in a pressure situation as you’re likely to just switch to another poor quality host.

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