Finding The Hosting Company For You
By Sean Burns
2003-10-14
Reader Rating: 
Here Is What I Believe You Should Do.
1. Contact owners of sites that you visit often and see if they will tell you who the host with - beware of a reply with an affiliate link. You can also do a Whois (http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois) search for their domain name - the results will show the domain name servers for their site - see if these servers correspond to who they told you about. Please note, this is not a perfect system as some hosting companies use different names on their name servers but it's a start.
2. Send an e-mail to the support staff at the hosting company you are thinking about. Ask a couple of questions about their service or about something to do with a requirement of your site. See how long it takes them to get back to you - in other words, test their support.
3. Go to a messageboard frequented by webmasters and ask about a particular host - SitePoint (http://www.sitepoint.com) have some good messageboards.
4. Look around the host's site to see if they have a messageboard for their customers - you'll get an idea of how their customers feel from this.
5. Ask me - e-mail me at mailto:seanb@webmastersreference.com with a hosting company name and I'll tell you if I've heard anything good or bad about them.
If you found this article interesting, you may want to read these as well:
» Add-On Domains, Parked Domains & Sub-Domains
» Web Hosts: Helping Us Navigate Through This Future Techno-World.
» Web Space or Bandwidth: Finding the Right Balance
» A Domain Name & Web Site - The Key To The Door.
» Web Hosting: To Switch or to Stay?
» What's In A Web Host?
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