Be Careful About Your Host

There are few things that you should be aware of when you choose your web host. Whether its a free hosting service or a paid one. I think these are pretty important if you care about your site.

Paid Hosting

• See if your host is reliable. Ask a few people about their service. Or you could just Google the web host’s name with a few keyword and see what comes up. You’ll probably get a few blog posts and/or forum discussions about them.
• Keep in mind that you get what you paid for. If your host is giving you a great deal like 50gb of space, 100gb of bandwidth, etc and the price tag is only $3 per month. Then I think your host is overselling (its when you give people more than you can since most customers don’t use all of their resources). And they might not have a good service since their server is packed tight with a lot more users than it can handle. And if a host doesn’t make money how will they stay in business. That means that they might go out of business like a lot of web hosts. So, don’t always go with the cheapest. Look for the one which offers a reliable service at a reasonable price.
• Check if they are a reseller. A reseller is someone or a host which buys a reseller plan from another host and they use the other host’s resources to provide you a web hosting service. Pretty much like pretending to be a web host. Now they might give you a good deal but their service might not be reliable. And anyone with a few extra bucks to spare per month can be a reseller. And so they might not have a good support.
• See how long they have been in the business. So that the next morning you don’t wake up to find your site down and your web host gone. No refund or anything. They probably ran out of business or they ran away with your money.
• Check their Terms and Conditions of Service and their policies and shit. If they are overselling and you use up like 60-90% of your resources then they might close your account and give you some bullshit reason. Why? Because if you use all of your resources then there will be a shortage on the server. Since they rely on resources that have not been used by other customers.
• Good support? Check for that. You need a good reliable support. And before you actually buy one of their hosting plans go chat with the sales rep (if they have a live chat) or email them and see if they are nice and if they type in a formal way or like “ok. we;ll do dat. dont worry about that.” or like “Yes. Sure we can do that for you.”

Free Hosting

• See if they have support. Like even a support forum where the users pretty much help each other.
• I know a guy who had a pretty successful forum and the web host downloaded his database and forum files. And made a clone of his forum and redirected the traffic from the real forum to the clone. And he could have sold the forum database to people (yeah there are people who buy them).
• Reliable? Check for that. You don’t want your site to be down all the time.

So, that’s it for now. I might later make a list of good hosting deals. Both free and paid.