How to Identify Trustworthy Web hosting Vendors

How to Identify Trustworthy Web hosting Vendors – If you conduct an online search for Web design or Web hosting, you’ll get pages and pages of vendors’ sites. So, how do you know who to trust? Here are a few tips to help you identify vendors that are worth considering:

Talk to other business owners: Find and talk to business owners whose opinions you respect and who have sites that you would like to emulate. Find out which vendors they use and ask how they’d rate their experience.

Surf the Web: Are there sites you particularly like? Contact the webmaster and find out who built the site. If the company or organization built it in-house, inquire about the hosting service they use.

Explore online resources: Sites that provide blogs, message boards, user ratings, or articles that focus on Web development and marketing can provide valuable insight.

Using a Checklist to Compare Vendors
After you’ve completed your research, narrow your list to several vendors that you’d like to consider to design and host your site and then compare them. Here’s a checklist of things to compare:

Overall offerings: Which vendors provide services that you need now and may need in the future? What added features do they offer above and beyond the standards — what are the “nice to haves”? Do they offer any assistance with marketing? Do they provide search engine services or statistics tools?

Basic features: Compare the “must haves” that each vendor provides, that is, amount of disk space and bandwidth, number of e-mail accounts, virus and spam protection, guaranteed uptime, and so on.

Design features: If you need to use templates, carefully review each vendor’s selection. Do they offer something you’ll use? Are you able to customize the templates and, if so, to what extent? Are their template tools easy to use? If you’re designing the site yourself or outsourcing design to a different vendor, what is the Web hosting vendor’s process for uploading your site to their server?

Reputation: From your research, you should already have narrowed your list to vendors that are reputable. However, you may still be able to narrow it further by looking at industry reviews and user feedback.

Uptime: Look for vendors that guarantee uptimes close to 100 percent. No vendor can guarantee 100 percent uptime.

Data backup: Make sure that regular backups are part of the vendor’s provided services.

Pricing: Compare apples to apples when you look at pricing. In other words, make sure that the site that has the lowest prices isn’t also offering less disk space or slower transfer speeds. If you’re comparing design and hosting packages, make sure both packages offer what you need and then determine which is the best value.

Customer support: Compare the levels and types of support that each vendor offers. Which are included and which support options result in additional charges? Stability: What is this company’s track record? Who are their clients? You should select a company that you believe will be around for years to come and provide consistent service.

Additional Reading: How to Select Your Design and Hosting Vendor