How to choose a good hosting for a decent site

The choice of hosting is also like choosing a wife:
before the wedding she is alone, after the wedding is different
and, most importantly, someone else's is always better!
(Drug)

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

What kind of company to choose the user to host your site from the thousands. How to find the one that suits him.

On the Internet, quite a few articles have already been written on this topic, and I have heard many theories, starting from the fact that you need to choose only companies with their own data center and ending with the one that you need to choose a company that does not have the word “host” in the title. Personally, I can argue with both theories.
')
I do not pretend to the truth in the final instance, but, nevertheless, having done a full journey from a hosting service consumer to the owner of a similar company, I have some experience. So, I will try to give some recommendations that can be checked in one way or another.

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

1) Reseller is bad.
Not necessarily, there are a lot of large companies that started their business with reselling. And since the reseller, as a rule, has hundreds of times less customers than large companies, they tend to pay more attention to them.

2) If there is round-the-clock support , then this is definitely a cool office. Of course, very few companies can afford qualified 24-hour support, but tens, if not hundreds of companies, claim it. What is the matter? Often, in such companies in the night support there is a part-time student who only knows how to turn on / off. Within companies, such a post is jokingly called “fleet-footed”.

3) The faster the ping - the faster my site will load . Very often, users try to determine the speed of hosting, measuring the ping to the servers of the host. Many articles have already been written on this topic, so “I will be brief”. In reality, ping does not reflect the actual download speed of your sites, for an objective assessment of the speed you need to take into account a number of other parameters, including server load. And if you are not posting a game project, then any hoster with a ping of less than 100 ms will do for you.

What to look for when choosing a hosting?

I will clarify that the discussion below will no longer concern technical issues, but rather organizational ones.

So:
1) The form of ownership of the company : at a minimum, the company must be officially registered as a state of emergency (IP) or LLC. Someone will say that, say, an 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 under the force of anyone who has at least 2000-3000 UAH. (250-375 dollars) in your pocket. And secondly, if an LLC responds in case of which with its authorized capital, the minimum amount of which is now equal to one minimum salary, 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) Availability of office . If the site hosting company of the details only email address, then: either this is another company created by a student, which usually exist for a maximum of 2 years, or the company is so young that it has not even earned to rent a small office.

In addition, it is always more pleasant when there is an opportunity to come to the office and live to communicate with people who 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 probability to get to people who love their job, who can stand out among hundreds of competitors and continue to exist after 2 years, but the likelihood of such a development is extremely small .

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

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

You can check it if you know the company's WMID by following the link:
passport.webmoney.ru/asp/certview.asp?wmid=NNN (where NNN is the WM identifier number)

4) Domain registration date Well, everything is simple, we check via whois - if the domain is registered less than one year ago - then we seriously think whether it is worth contacting.

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

On the other hand, even if the majority of positive reviews, this is also not an indicator. Since such reviews are often written by company employees themselves, it’s often very easy to identify them on the forum, as a rule, they are written on behalf of a user who has less than 5 forum posts, that is, a person has registered just to leave a review.

What reviews can you trust?

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

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

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

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 two things, or it does not work with organizations, or, most likely, it simply does not have a checking account.

As for the other payment methods, now the connection process to all payment gateways is very simple and is available to everyone, except for connecting to payment terminals. Payment through payment terminals, if the company, among others, has such a payment option, then you are guaranteed a large company. Since companies with less than 1000 customers and small turnovers, 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. So far, only a few of the largest hosting companies offer the possibility of payment through payment terminals.

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

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

9) Availability of a city telephone number a. Now you can almost ignore it now, because 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 where it has an office.

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

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