Are you purchasing a web hosting?
Keep your eyes open, there are good chances that you may end up with something that you had not asked for. The below items are what you need to watch out for while going for a web hosting service.
- Good technical support 24x7. There are web hosting companies which provide email support, while there are others which offer telephonic support or support over chat. Prefer the one with whom you can speak to. I remember I had a problem once with a particular web page and when I wrote to the hosting company's support they replied the problem is in my code (which was working fine on another hosting service) all emails came back with the same answer. Finally the problem turned out that the hosting provider didnt make the directory they allocated me as a virtual directory.
- Have a fast connection to where your target audience is. Consider the below two scenerios.
- Super fast connection but shared hosting with a spam mail service will essentially give you less speed which translates into slow pages for your customers.
- Super fast connection but hosted in Europe while your target audiance is in America, the target audiance will face a latency in the pages browsed.
- Gurantee minimum 99% uptime and have scheduled maintanence (at night time for your target audiance). When your website is successful, one day that it is down can cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars.
- You should have your own domain name and that the hosting provider should charge you for using it on their hosting. It may come as a rude shock when they ask for 12$-40$ for domain addition.
- Subdomains should be available.
- Unlimited emails on your domains.
- No/ reasonable limits on database size. I remember when I purchased hosting space they mentioned MySQL and PHP. They never wrote it on the first page that they give only 5mb of sql database and PHP config was stripped down. So I ended up paying much more rather than saving a few bucks.
- Free setup (There are many who charge nearly 100$ for setup)
- Free search engine submission. (Note be careful esp of not submitting lots of entrypoints to your website)
Also at bhagyesht amazing webhosting tips and interesting blog
