715774_90183140In the last 5 years or so, we’ve had the opportunity to test out A LOT of different web hosting companies. While I’d love to tell you that this is because of our insatiable lust for new technologies, the reality is that we never seem to be able to find one that works 100% of the time. Probably the biggest issue we’ve had to deal with is that some hosts seem great in the beginning, but really start to degrade their service over time. This makes it almost impossible to judge a web host without giving it a test run, kind of like an old Volkswagen Rabbit. You never know what you’ll get till you put your foot on the gas…

As a result, we’ve done our fair share of provider hopping. All told, we have switched from 10 different web hosts for a variety of reasons. I won’t specifically list which companies (you can send us a message if you want to know) but our problems have run the gauntlet from horrible amounts of downtime to shoddy customer service. One thing we’ve learned, though, is the signs of a bad host. Hopefully our pain becomes your gain and we can help you avoid your own bad hosts…

Before Signing Up

  1. Look for a community around the site. Things like regularly updated blogs and web forums are good indicators that the host has nothing to hide. You’ll find a lot of hosts will avoid these tools to prevent other users from alerting you to problems.
  2. Find out what happens if you want to leave in the middle of a paid month outside your trial period. If the host offers anything other than a partial refund for time unused and immediate cancellation, then you need to take a step back. Many web hosts that know their service is bad, implement plans that ensure they milk you out of those last few bucks before you quit.
  3. Check the hosting packages. If they seem too good to be true, then most likely the company is saving money by overloading servers and hurting everyone who hosts with them. Reasonable sites have reasonable packages.
  4. Look into the servers and backbone the hosting company uses. Quite a few web hosts simply load their servers on another companies backbone and then sell packages to you as if they run it themselves. While this is not bad in and of itself, you might want to research the track record of the REAL company hosting your sites are going to use.
  5. Look into the companies policy on requests to transfer to another server. Sometimes bad luck can hit you and you get hosted on a server with another site whose traffic starts to take off (thus slowing down yours). If you ask your web host for a transfer to a less populated server, what will they say? Most good hosts will accommodate the request if they can, no questions asked…  
  6. Look at the extra features they provide to you. If a web host charges you extra for services such as SSH and FTP you need to be careful. While obviously there are limits (especially on number of users) basic access to these tools is free for them to setup and takes seconds to configure and maintain. Charging you a regular fee just for convenience in accessing your site over SSH is a sign of a greedy web host and one who is most likely also overloading servers to save a buck.
  7. Find out when and why you can contact technical support. All decent hosts should have 24/7 support and respond within minutes of a problem. You don’t necessarily require phone support, online chat and forums work too, but having real people there to solve your problems shows an extra level of commitment. Having no people to answer your problems, only answering machines, is another problem altogether.
  8. Check for a guarantee on number of sites per server. Some hosting companies will let you know how many sites they will allow per server. This is a good sign that they will stay on top of their own growth. It’s one thing to say it though and another to actually do it. Look for news items indicating addition of new servers to their infrastructure.  

After Signing Up

  1. Check your site at all hours of the day, especially peak ones, for the first few weeks. Peak downtimes can indicate overloaded servers or underpowered equipment while off peak downtimes can indicate that you might be sharing your server with spammers or at least traffic guzzling neighbour sites.
  2. Watch out for intermittent database drops. You’d be surprised how many web hosting providers are unaware of how to configure MySQL or PostgreSQL to support a large number of databases and users. If your site is staying up, but you are losing connection to your database once in a while, this is a good indicator that either the server is overloaded or the provider does not have the skill set to administrate your database properly.
  3. Look into the speed of the hosting tools your host provides you. We signed up with a host once that had site management tools that were so slow they timed out all the time when using them. If your host can’t make it painless for you to upload your site, your real pain is just around the corner.
  4. Check your site speed against the speed of the web hosts own site. Obviously their site will be on a more dedicated setup, but your performance should be somewhat similar to theirs. If your host has a site that is lightning fast but your plain ole website is taking 60 seconds to load, then there is definitely an issue. If the web host itself is not hosting on the same backbone and same equipment, how can you trust it to work for you?

A lot of these points are guidelines, and you have to use your own common sense when deciding whether or not a web host is right for you. Finding a good web host can be a painfully long process. Whenever you can, talk to others and take advice from them. A lot of hosts play some really dirty games and getting some recommendations can save you a lot of headaches in the long run. For advice on which web hosting provider to use, our favourite site is Host-Finder. They provide a top user ranked listing of hosting providers separated by packages they support. Very handy for finding a new host to go with…