A successful choice of the hosting provider is the base for your representation in the Internet. Therefore, not each from the existing companies provides a proper services level. There are some conditions that should be met by hosting providers. They can be presented as seven main questions.
1. How much disk space do they propose?
The most part of the hosting providers proposes fifty, ten, two hundred and more MB of the web space. Payments for these volumes are low enough, thus, this is an appropriate choice for the small projects owners. Moreover, if your Internet presentation is going to consume more space, then, you should think about the alternative solutions. This is about the projects with a high monthly traffic and a lot of the graphic resources. At any case you must know how much disk space does the provider proposes for the monthly payment.
2. Does the provider suggest a FTP access, e-mail services, scripts and database management systems?
Fortunately, the most part of the hosting providers meets these requirements. You can always access your site by the FTP, have unlimited number of POP-3 accounts, have your own MySQL database, etc.
You should know whether your provider supplies such services as CGI, Perl, C, PHP and a MySQL support? Do they require an additional payment for the usage of these services?
3. Are there any additional payments beyond the established tariff?
Some providers hide the additional payments and it may become a surprise for you afterwards. You should know how much disk space you can use additionally for the databases and mail storing and what the prices for the quotes are.
4. What is the level of the support services?
The twenty four hour support, available by phone or e-mail, is a necessary condition for the high quality hosting services. They must provide you with the contact information. You should know the opinions of other hosting clients, if it is possible.
5. Do they provide the statistics of the server visits?
These services should include such items as:
- Number of the unique visitors, number of clicks inside the site per day;
- Statistics of the visits per hour;
- Separate statistics for each page;
- Users' IP addresses;
- Initial pages for the users;
- The last pages for the users that are leaving your web site;
- Sites and pages that are referencing to your site;
- Browsers that are used by your visitors.
This opportunity is very important for your site. You will know more about the life of your site and it will give you a possibility to plan the work better and control the advertisement company.
6. How many domains and sub-domains can you get?
Actually, the answer to this question depends on how much disk space you have in your tariff plan. You will get no more than one domain if you pay for 50MB of the disk space each month.
7. What is the connection speed for their channels?
This is the most popular technical criteria for the hosting companies. Get this information in advance before signing the contract. The speed of the site loading is very important for the users. No one will be waiting for the page opening for a few minutes, when there are many web sites with a normal performance. Therefore, you should be able to provide the claims if the connection speed is too low.