Choosing a Web Hosting Provider
from 40 Million Other Web Hosts - Pt2Follow this step by step process for choosing one web hosting provider from 40 million others that will match your chosen requirements.
You may also like to read the first part of this article that you'll find at :
Choosing a Web Hosting Provider from 40 Million Other Web Hosts - Pt1
In choosing a web hosting provider decide what's really important to you.
Price versus features is important, but the quality of support you get will make, or break your stay with a web host and I speak from many experiences.
Support should be one of your highest priorities. Management and Easy control of your web hosting should be a high priority.
Probably the easiest and most comprehensive control panel is "CPanel."
Go to Google.com and select Advanced Search. In the "with the exact phrase" box
type " cpanel web hosting " excluding the quotes. If you click on Search, Google will show over 90,000 results. But if you actually look at the number of pages Google displays by ignoring pages from the same domain, there are just over 350 web hosting provider 's listed.
Using Google means you can use good Advanced Search filtering. Support from a web hosting provider should be your highest priority.
At the Google Advanced Search "with all of the words" box add the term " support ticket " without the quotes. If you click on Search now, Google will list just over 4,000 results.
To refine the search further you can use the Advanced Search field called "occurrences." Try selecting "Return Results in the Text of the Page" and the search is reduced to about 500 results and when pages from the same domain are removed gives just over 170 listings.
You can further refine the search by adding another term, in my case it's the term
" Awstats " added to " Support Ticket ", so I'm now looking for sites that have
" support ticket awstats" of which there were 30 listed.
I use the term " support ticket " because a web host serious about support will have a support ticket system. By that I don't mean just an email address to send support request to, but a trouble ticketing system that monitors and tracks support tickets. It should also give you access to review the status of any tickets you have raised, set priorities and check response times.
I added the term Awstats because I want web hosting provider's who use that particular web hosting statistics package.
You could also add other terms like " Linux " if you want that server platform instead of Windows based servers or visa versa.
Use Advanced Search Occurrences to return results in the text of the page.
If the web hosting provider considers these terms to be important they'll be in the main text of their web page, not sidelined somewhere else.
Decide what you don't want from a web hosting provider and exclude them.
The next word to use in our Advanced Search is in the "without the words" box.
Here you could type " reseller " without the quotes. So we're now looking for
" web hosting ", with " CPanel ", who must have a " support ticket " system with
" Awstats " and excludes " reseller. "
An Advanced Search reveals 5 web hosting provider sites shown by Google after removing pages from the same domain.
What we have achieved so far is to narrow the search for a term like
" web hosting " which on Google gives over 32 million results, down to just 5 results which is a bit more manageable.
Of course you could use your own terms for filtering and I suggest you do, but these are the ones I have used. If you don't get enough sites to make a choice from then go back and relax some of the Advanced Search criteria until you do. First try relaxing the Occurrences to "anywhere in the page."
Since 5 results was too small a sample to be choosing from, by trying different selection filters I produced a short list of 20 web hosting provider 's that I could use in the next phase of the selection process.
If you're wondering why I excluded resellers in my search, it's because with a reseller you are buying hosting services through a 3rd party and not directly from the web host. This can cause problems with support because you very often need to go through the reseller who provides 1st line support before contacting the web host.
Since your No.1 priority is support, using a reseller of someone else's web hosting is not in your best interests. Of course if the web host is providing reseller services to others then that's OK but you will want to deal directly with the seller. Do background checks on your web hosting provider 's
Once you have a short list of possible web hosting provider 's, go to WhoIs Source and type in the domain name of the provider.
i) Check the Alexa Ranking, to see if it's between 1 and 700,000 and whether it's moved downward significantly in the past 3 months. If the Alexa ranking is more than 700,000 the site probably gets very low traffic.
A big downward shift in ranking could mean the web host is struggling.
With Alexa the lower the number, the better the ranking.
ii) Under the reverse IP check how many web sites the web server hosts. If it's a large number this could mean the server is too heavily loaded. If it shows a small number this doesn't mean the web hosting provider has very few customers. Web hosts frequently host their own site or sites on one server and their customers on other servers, so a small number of sites is probably just the web hosts own sites.
iii) Check when the domain name was registered and how long its been registered. When the domain name was registered tells you how long the web host has been trading under that domain. If the domain is only registered for 2 years they may be unsure how long they expect to be around.
Choose only web hosting provider 's with a minimum 4 year registration.
iv) Compare the Alexa Ranking with the time the domain has been registered. If the domain has been registered for more than 3 years and the site still has a ranking greater than 400,000 you may want to do some further investigation if this provider becomes your No.1 choice from the later selection factors.
v) Note down the domain name servers listed for this web hosting provider as you will need this information for another check.
If the DNS name does not bear any relationship to the main URL of the web hosting provider, this may be a reseller in disguise.
vi) Note down the IP location which is the physical location of the web hosts server.
You'll find it helps to use a spreadsheet to save factors from above for each web hosting provider, along with the IP trace results from the next step.
Check your web hosting provider 's network
Next you should do an IP Trace on the primary domain name server for the web hosting provider and/or on the URL domain name of the web host.
A good IP Route Tracer is available from PingPlotter where you can download a 30 day trial version. Install it and then type the DNS server name and or the URL of the web host as the address to trace.
An IP tracer will tell you how many hops (network servers) the route takes from you to the web host as well as the response time in milliseconds.
If the response time is more than 200ms you may have problems in your domain being slow to respond to requests from visitors to your web site.
The more network hops, the more potential points you have at which network congestion or failure can occur. If there are more than 18 hops try checking the response times at peak traffic periods of the day.
With PingPlotter you can plot the response times over 24 hours or weeks.
This will show you if and where any traffic congestion's points exist in the network route to the server, at any time of the day or night.
You also need to consider where the web host is located physically which you noted above. If the web host is in the US but you expect most of your site visitors to be from Europe then it's more important to run an IP trace from Europe, not from the US.
From Europe to the US you should typically expect 15 hops and an average response time of 150ms. If you're based inside the same country as the web host then a typical response time would be 20 to 50 ms.
You'll find the remaining steps of this process in the 3rd and final part of this article at :
Choosing a Web Hosting Provider from 40 Million Other Web Hosts - Pt3
Making Your Website Work for You
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