Hosting FAQ

[Sudhakar]

How do I make Initial Company List? First, try opening a web hosting directory such as WebHostDir.com. Select the category you need and read the descriptions of each company, add those that catch your attention to a file (in Word or Notepad). Then, browse this forum, and take a look for threads from people that positively review their company, there will be several of those every day. If you are looking for bigger companies, open Google and type in ' reliable web hosting
'. With so many companies, making a list with 10 to 20 different companies should not be difficult.

Why does choosing a large company does not guarantee quality? The main reason is that you are simply a number to them. Large web hosting companies, with thousands and thousands of customers cannot care about each customer as much as smaller hosts can. As a trend, the biggest players usually focus on overselling and providing mass servers instead of quality, which hurts customer support and often uptime. That does not mean that larger companies cannot provide good service, but having a lot of customers is not necessarily an indication of great service.

How do I perform a Whois? In the address bar of your browser, type in: ' whois.sc/[domain name] '. If I wanted to do a whois of Google, I would type in 'whois.sc/google.com '. Whois can provide valuable information on the age and registrant of the domain.

Why are backups important? In-case of a hard disk failure. Every hard drive will fail eventually, loosing all information. If there are no backups of your data, it will be completely lost. Many hosting companies perform their own backups now, but you should always make your own in addition, because in most cases a company cannot be held responsible for losing your information.

Why should I not use ping to tell server speed? Many companies block ICMP packets and therefore block ping for security benefits. If you attempt to ping the domain or IP, a timeout error will be returned. Also, ping can change depending on your location, although this will not noticeably effect the loading time in website hosting. One more reason not to use ping is that it does not provide any accurate results in terms of database usage.