Question List Before Choose Hosting Service

By Admin

November 01, 2007

Some hosting service offering turnkey packet, from planning, designing, programs, till physical maintenance our site. If you want to use this turnkey packet better to evaluate accurate all the option present, make sure to get write estimate price with hour to hour tariff as well it cost recapitulation to every phase of project.

If we have decide to choose web hosting with good service, economical, customer friendly then the next is several question maybe can help you :

 

1. How fast and stable their connectivity to internet? Are they can guarantee service and support 24 hours? Are they have uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) and good back-up system?

Of course it will be hurt if we spend tens million money to built a site but what you get only complaint from our visitors because our site is very slow. The web hosting service better has minimum 2 connectivity to internet at speed 2 mbps or higher. Better if has direct connection to Indonesia Internet Exchange (IIX) if targeted to audience in Indonesia.

 

2. How long they have operated? How many employee they have?

For serious web site, you need to avoid a start-up web hosting company. Admittedly, start-up web hosting company will gainful if you are looking for cheap service. But if you want run the business seriously, want or not you have to choose a good service that has a professional programmer, network specialist and good costumer service staff.

 

3. Are they giving full serves domain name, example www.yourdomain.com?

Several hosting service won’t care to make alias that needed to support many different domain name. As a change some time they offering address form like www.providerhosting.com/yourdomain/ that of course not as cool as www.yourdomain.com. So, if your ISP or hosting provider can't support domain name fully, better to think to looking for the others.

 

4. How much megabyte data may deposit? Are there additional expenses to big traffic that pass through your site?

Try to looking for provider which can give 25 MB in minimum that standard generally now. For bigger site probably will need bigger space. Generally provider / web hosting will ask additional payment for over limit bandwidth. Therefore we need planning how big data that be transferred every month and how much money be needed if we over the limit.

 

5. What traffic report form that given by hosting service is?

Of course we must get traffic report which containing our site visited. Will much more data can we get with traffic report, base on the report present will really helpfully tune our site base on reader needed and request.

 

6. Ho do you update web page? Have you File Transfer Protocol (FTP) access?

Most common up-date method and easy is editing that web page in our computer and up-loading (transferring) that file to web server using FTP program.

 

7. Is hosting service supporting CGI so we can use form, data base lookers and image map?

If you want get a form/image map you must have full access to CGI -bin directory. CGI directory (Common Gateway Interface) where you put script and any program that run by web deposited. Generally hosting service will give this service.

 

8. Is there any security that guarantees hacker/cracker can't come in?

Can not deny security is one of the most important things in business on internet. To this day there is not even one technology that so perfect that can bearing up cracker attack. How can we minimizing this attack possibility? The simplest way is ask is it providing a specialist in security / network security. Yah... nothing you can do, if there are nobody network security specialist in that provider better you move to another provider.

Usually we want hear is how they monitoring activity at network for 24 hours which can detect unusual activity before it do any harmed. Usually they have any program to firewall or to solve general security problem. To you who want learn about security problem seriously better begin to read National Institute of Computer Security Resource Clearinghouse csrc.nist.gov SANS Institute www.sans.org Rootshell www.rootshell.com.