Your hosting provider is a crucial partner in the success of your business. Make sure to do your due diligence when deciding which host to use.

You will find a lot of fly by night companies offering the best prices possible. It will make you think “look how much I can save”. Think again. The amount you’ll save by using a cheap host instead of a reputable one such as RackSpace is negligible.

With a proper host, you will get a very high level of support. They would go above and beyond what is contractually required of them. When and if there is downtime, how your host handles it defines the quality of their commitment to you. I’ve had some pretty bad experiences with some hosting companies. One host had an outage that lasted for 13 hours, during which you couldn’t get through to anyone at their company. Is that worth saving $100 a month? How much business was lost?

Bottom Line

Like everything else in life, you get what you pay for.

Image Credit: Steinar Johnsen