Every now and then I find newbies and few older friends asking the same question, how do i know which host is good and which host should we stick with ?

Answer is simple. Nothing comes for free and sooner you realise it better it is.
We are in year 2006 and things cost money, so if you expect something you pay for it in one way or another.

Paid hosts charge you money and free hosts many atimes recover costs thru ad revenues or related. A few may be dare to go without that also.

Now here we discuss what we have to cautious off and what we need to be sure of before sticking with some host.

Before we go further, you need to decide which host you want to go for ? Free or Paid.
Remember nothing comes for free, so whatever is called Free will still be coming at some cost.
I'll cover Paid hosts in my other thread. I'll restrict this one to free webhosts.

okay, seems you have decide to hunt for a good free webhost.

You use mother of all searches, google and find long list of sites boasting of free hosting and attractive plans and you manage to signup for one of those offering you great Unlimited features with healthy space and bandwidth. WOW! in an hour you got free host. You da man! Really ?

Naah, seems like you did not do your homework and unless you are lucky, you have invited trouble for yourself.

I am not going to say for or against any but here is what you look for in sequence before deciding on any host.

1) Reseller/Dedicated
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First and foremost check out what type of hosting do they have, what type of servers do they have ? Are they themselves on resellers or have dedicated servers ?

Reselers are smaller and make them dependent on server provider for support.

Dedicated are costly and give them free hand to control servers.

Dual Xeon dedicated server which is good one usually comes as 80Gb with 1200Gb. or similar, and its close to $200-300/month. Now if someone boasts of providing you 100Gb bandwidth and 10 Gb space, be sure hes either overselling it (because that way he can only cater to 8 people, unless he spends additional 50-100$ for harddisk ,so cost increases from 250 -400 then per month) or hes fooling around by assuming no one will use 10gb space and he can have many there, but also with 100Gb bandwidth he can have no more than 10 people, with 50Gb bandwidth per month not more than 20 people.
When someone is spending close to 400$/month on dedicated, he would like to have much much more than 20 people, so that at time of sale he has good database(memberbase-hosted) to sell.




2) How long in business
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Nowadays any TomDickHarry wakes from bed and starts hosting,, but will you risk your efforts with any such who is new and not much experience ?
I don't say, its not good to trust new ones but then there is element of risk and you can always have a mirror with them, observe them for a month o so and then only when feel comfortable, move your actual site. Problem is most such hosts are only concerned with growing up host, having many members and traffic and then selling it to other person.
Also, most new comers start from resellers and don't think about spending hughe amount on dedicated, rightly so but then you have to be careful.

3) Website and details provided
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Many forums have posts like if you need hosting PM me, and no site links are given or they give excuses like site is under construction and related.
These are the ones to save yourself from.
You expect a good host to have a decent website, not really that flashy or big one, a simple one where it expresses all its policies and trends.
So, see if they have website and if yes, how detailed or informative it is ?
Do they mention their TOS (Terms Of Services),Policies, Plans, Support methods, and contact details of owner atleast ?
If the site throws 404 or shows under construction, get it straight. People who don't have time to support themselves and their sites care for supporting you the least. A simple decent website that is informative, is a step forward to look into other features and assets.

4) Ads- Yes/No
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When satisfied with above mentioend points, next in list is issue of ads ,be it text,popups,pop-unders,banners or related.
If host clearly mentions it, trust it. Many will not even mention about ads and these are the ones to think about twice before applying.
Confirm yourself if ads are allowed or not.
Here I want to say again, nothing comes for free. Free hosting you get, but someone is paying cost of it, and whosoever pays money to let you enjoy free will require to cut down his losses and may try ads as source of revenue, though ads don't fetch much unless its investment is less.
Also, understand one thing more, why would someone pay for you to enjoy ? Hes only paying to build up hosting and then he can sell for higher price and recover his losses. Its investment which he makes every month to fetch himself higher profit when sold. Many succeed and others suffer losses. But intention is same.

5) Features
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Hey that host says Unlimited sqls,addons and related.
What will you do when a lion comes in front of you ? You'll run to save your life. Whenever you see word unlimited, with regards to features ( i mean sqls,addons, parked and related) run away to save your a**.
Its a literally lifeless host which claims to provide unlimited stuff.
There is nothing called Unlimited.
There is always a limit, though it may be that high for most users to ever reach but limit is there. Its again attractive ploy by many, to get more people hosted and grow their hosting and then sell for higher price.
Also, people distribute say 100 sqls and more. Well you install a forum, a blog, a oscommerce script, a guestbook, a form generator, a wiki,a gallery, one or two other things besides your site or CMS.At most you consume 10 sqls and even that is too much, you don't need that many unless you are big site desinger king or something. So, what do kids do with those extra sqls. They will play and test their scripts, scripts like mail bombing and proxy etc. etc. and this will load up system respources and consume too much to mke server skow , slow and finally downtime untill server team reboots and suspends culprit.
It again brings to point no.1 ,if they are on dedicated server, they have all controls and they can reboot as and when they find and also punish culprit but if they are on reseller which usually have limits in space and bandwidth, they are entirely dependent on server team to do the job.

CPanel and related all come for cost and same thing, if they are giving you that free, they will either expect you to have adsense or generate them revenues in other ways like posting in forums, so they have high traffic forum and their domain;s worth also rises and they can fetch money or more adrevenues to cut down costs.

One important thing to consider here is

SUPPORT
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How decent and supportive your host is ?
If it takes weeks to solve your problem, you'll run the other way, remember lion in front of you.
If its abusive, remember the lion example.

In nutshell, features are not the first thing to consider, but one of the things for sure.

I hope this long article will help few atleast to decide and stick with better hosts.

Last thing you want is looking for new host every month or loosing site frequently. Every big downtime costs you visitors and members and surely you wouldn't like to suffer that thru someone new with reseller and unlimited stuff.

Thomas

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