Points to consider when looking for hosting

Points to consider when looking for hosting.

There are literally hundreds of hosting services to be found on the Internet. These range from the big well known companies down through the smaller independent operations, and down to the one/two man operations that are resellers for the bigger companies.

So How do you decide who is right for you?

Support

Is support by ticket only or can you actually talk to someone live and if so can they take action for you or do they have to pass everything on to someone else?
What is the turn round time for support? How long does it take to get a ticket answered?
Can you talk to the company before you sign up for a hosting package to ensure you get the package that is right for you, not the package that earns them the most money?

We have clients that can testify that they came to us fully prepared to buy the premium package and after discussing their needs we have convinced them to invest in an economy package. Why? Because we serve your best interests.

Pitfalls to watch out for.

Undeliverable promises

Many companies these days offer "unlimited" bandwidth and / or disk space.

Lets face it, nothing is unlimited, there will more than likely be a fair usage policy hidden somewhere in small print.

Drive size

Most Server Hard drives are at most 500Gb (although now there are larger drives coming on to the market but these are not very common yet). And most servers have 1 or at best 2 drives in them.

Based on this information a company offering 200Gb of drive space, could only have a maximum of 5 clients per server! This is a totally unrealistic number unless they are prepared to run their business at a loss as server costs would far outweigh the income.

The only way they can make their server viable is to oversell the space and then hope and pray that most of their clients will not actually use all the space they have been allocated.Which of course, they probably won't as most web site owners only need a small amount of disk space and 500 Mb is far more than enough for most purposes, especially if you are not planning on using data bases.

The hosting companies don't tell you this in their hype. They just sell you 200GB, knowing you are paying for something you are never going to use. And if you tried to use it, you would quickly discover it wasn't in fact yours, but was shared with every other website owner!

Bandwidth

This again is in most cases oversold by most companies and again they hope and pray that most of their clients will not use very much.

When LowCost-Webspace was set up we did various calculations based on

The amount of disk space available to us
The amount of bandwidth allocated by the Data center
The disk space usage of an average website
The average bandwidth used by an average website owner
The necessity of a reserve drive and bandwith space for anyone that needs any extra over and above the standard package allocations.

LowCost Webspace guarantees to NEVER oversell disk space. We invest in extra drive space and / or bandwidth according to the need of our customers. If you need more, we buy more. We do not simply let you use someone else's in the hope that they don't need it.

Bill Brown aka Bjantiques

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Telephone +32496088838