Questions to Ask a Web Hosting Company

**m42** · 20 December, 2008, 20:09 PM

Before you sign that six month contract with a hosting company:

A few things to ask:

What hosting services do you provide?
Do you provide cPanel or a similar menu-based application?
Do you provide backup services? How often? Is it something you configure or something I have to configure on my own?
Do you provide Agora or a similiar shopping cart application? Is it something you configure or something I have to configure on my own?
Do you provide or run web statistics software? How often? Can I make arrangements to run stats on demand?
What support services do you provide?
What are your support hours?
How do you charge?
If by throughput and disk space, will you suspend my service if I surpass the monthly quotas or just bill me for the overage?
If I register a domain name with you, will it be under my name or yours?
If I register a domain with you, can I transfer it --regardless of reason, sans notice, and whenever I choose, without having to worry about extra charges?
Do you offer SSH upon request?
Have you disabled any .htaccess options?

Anything missing? Feel free to add it!

**Charles** · 21 December, 2008, 01:31 AM

Addererd.

**MeetHere** · 21 December, 2008, 01:45 AM

will you ban on digg/slashdot effect ?

**5starpix** · 29 December, 2008, 00:51 AM

This site provides some good info

What to Look for in a Web Host

**gatekeeper** · 2 January, 2009, 12:58 PM

Hmm what if you can have a really free professional web hosting company to use and create account on? Like what I found, Free Professional Web Hosting.

**eXe** · 4 January, 2009, 23:35 PM

Good list, also:

Do you have access to real people at the data center where the server is located to quickly resolve any issues?

How long have you been in business/ How many people do you employ/ What is your monthly turnover (these are good indicators of the reliability of the host.) Beware of lies though, a lot of web hosts especially on WHT are the CEO, CTO & Support crew rolled into 1. A 1 man show does not work in the hosting business unless support is outsourced. A hosting company with xxx or xxxx customers can't have 1 person answering all the support tickets.

Also, avoid shared hosts that oversell. You probably don't need 500GB space to host a few websites, especially at the cost of $5/month. Hostluck.com is 1 of the better options for reliable, non oversold cheap hosting.

**Shenron** · 4 January, 2009, 23:50 PM

How many different IP's do you offer?
How can I extend those?

**newgenservices** · 6 January, 2009, 08:03 AM

Thanks for this thread. It helped in creating our FAQ here at NetBuilders.

To Add :

Q) Do you allow warez hosting, nulled scripts and hack or crack tools or proxies or ponzi related sites ?
Q) Can i have a Ping / Speed Test ?
Q) Do you offer unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth?
Q) Does your hosting has DDOS Protection / Firewall / AntiVirus?

**Coastercraze** · 9 January, 2009, 03:26 AM

Some questions I've been asked in the past:

Do you have a server status script similar to Status2K where I can see the current status of your server?
How big is your server's hard drive?
What is the connection speed?
Am I able to run proxies on your hosting?
How much RAM / CPU are we allowed to use before being suspended?
Is Shell available? If so is it jailed or normal?
Is the price I pay locked in or will it increase over time?
Will I be able to host more than a hundred domains or will you suspend me?
Do you have a SLA (Service Level Agreement) in place?
If I opt to pay yearly is there a discount available?