Is The Hosting Company Reliable Or Not! How To Find Out?

Guest post by Joanna
When you are looking for a business hosting offer, reliability of the web hosting provider you are about to pick is of primary importance, no matter if you plan to get windows VPS hosting, shared hosting, or any other type of web hosting package. Picking a reliable web hosting company is really vital because if your web host isn’t reliable, you will experience all kinds of problems – your site will frequently be down, leaving your customers unhappy, you won’t be getting the support you need when you need it, etc.

While you can never be sure that you have picked a really reliable web host, no matter how hard you try and how much you research your potential business hosting providers, there are ways to filter at least the unprofessional providers and then from the shortlist select a good provider. Here are 10 questions you could ask your potential business hosting provider and based on their answers decide if this company is worth trying or not.

10 Questions to Ask a Web Hosting Company

There are many questions you can ask a potential business hosting provider. Here are 10 questions to start with:

1. How much downtime you have?
2. How powerful are your servers?
3. What is the average load of your servers?
4. Is your support 24×7?
5. Do you offer phone support?
6. Can you guarantee a minimal bandwidth?
7. How many accounts are there on one server?
8. If I start with a given web hosting package, will it be possible to upgrade it or downgrade it later?
9. Name some popular web sites that are hosted with you.
10. Can you show references from clients?

These questions are more or less standard to ask and any reputable best web host won’t have difficulties giving you an answer. However, if the host you are asking, is unwilling to answer, or gives vague answers, this is a warning sign that it is not a reliable business web hosting. In this case you just need to move on to the next business hosting provider on your list.

Reliable Web Hosting Companies

There are many lists of reliable web hosting providers but if you don’t feel like checking millions of companies, here are two of the best web hosts, which offer windows VPS hosting and other types of business hosting and they are both known for their reliability:

1. Just Host
2. HostMonster

Both companies are very reputable and reliable and the easiest proof for their professionalism is to start a Live Chat session with a representative of theirs and ask the 10 questions listed above.

More Useful Hints to Test If a Web Hosting Company Is Reliable

The answers to the 10 questions will give you enough information if the business host you are interviewing is a reliable one or not. Sometimes it is possible that the support rep you are interviewing doesn’t know all the answers (for instance the answer to the question about the average number of accounts per server), or needs to check in order to give you a more detailed answer. This is fine and it doesn’t mean that the host isn’t a reliable one.

In addition to the answers to your questions, you can go a step further, do some additional research and get even more information. For instance, reading user feedback on forums is another way to learn if a particular web hosting provider is reliable or not. Search with Google for user feedback about the provider of interest to you and see what users have to say. Needless to say, you shouldn’t believe everything you read but if you read mainly negatives, or mainly positives for a given web hosting provider, this is enough to reach a conclusion.

It might seem that asking so many questions and doing research is a waste of time. No, it isn’t. If you don’t do it and pick an unprofessional web host, this will cause so many problems and will waste you much more time than you would have lost if you had done some preliminary research.

Author Bio:

The article has been penned down by Joanna, who works for web hosting search. And has been part of web industry from quite some time now.