Finding Web Hosts Without Server Downtime

It’s not an easy accomplishment with finding a Web Host that doesn’t have much or any server downtime. Infact, over time it’s quite impossible that you’ll ever find a Web Host that doesn’t have server downtime. Even the biggest companies in the world like Google have issues at times.

How NOT to find a Web Host Without Server Downtime?

The key to find a good web host is to not get sold by those gimmicks promising 99.9% uptime or offering no server downtime and being on “top 10 web host” sites that are only affiliate sites. Instead focus on trying to find a web host that has consistent results. But how do you find a web host that has good results you ask? Well, this is the challenge for you.

One important thing you need to focus on not paying too much attention on is what you read online about specific companies. If you really look thoroughly through Google, you’ll notice that EVERY big web hosting company has had an enormous amount of bad feedback. Whether it’s poor customer service, server downtime, hacked site, any Web Host is bound to have this type of bad feedback. Infact, I’m sure you can find bad feedback about ANY company whether it’s a retail store or restaurant. Infact I think it would worry me if a company didn’t have any bad feedback because if that’s the case then they’re probably not that large of a company to begin with. Complaining is a part of life for some people out there, and unfortunately when someone has an exceptionally good experience it’s not shared as much, but almost always when it comes to sharing a bad experience.

So we know this so far… Companies use marketing gimmicks like “moneyback guarantee”, “99.9% uptime”, “no server downtime”, fake affiliate driven “top 10 web host” pages, along with having a ton of bad feedback. Not to say that these companies are bad or anything, because most web hosts will generally run well but can vary depending on your website.

How to find a Web Host without server downtime?

So how do we find the best of companies? Well, my suggestion is to take a look at web hosts for sites that you use frequently and that run well for you with little server downtime. For example, I regularly frequent on different forums and can tell that their web host must be pretty good if I (and thousands of others) have been able to use their forum for a few years with only minimal server downtime. You can check who hosts a certain site by going to a site that allows you to do a whois lookup. You could try www.who.is or www.domaintools.com. For example, you could go to www.who.is/whois/techescape.net if you wanted to get information on this site. It will show you who my Web Host is as well as when my domain was registered and when it expires. Of course this wont always work because there’s always those sites that run their own servers.

Something else I’d suggest you take action on is… Asking questions to your potential web host. You could start by trying to contact them. Is that a difficult task? It shouldn’t be. Personally I prefer and would recommend getting a web host that offers phone support. The rep on the other end may not be the most web host savvy person, nor will they be able to tell you if their services have a lot of server downtime, but it’s a good start that you can actually get through to someone and also that you can ask questions on the services you will be receiving.

There are various questions you can ask your Web Host. Before asking you may want to familiarize yourself with some Web Hosting terms like “Shared Hosting”, “Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting”, and “Dedicated Hosting”. These terms explain how a web hosting company has their servers structured. If they’re a “Shared Hosting” company then that generally means they could have thousands of their customers websites on an individual server. With Virtual Private Servers you’re placed on servers that are less packed. With Dedicated Servers you’re even less packed than VPS and can sometimes even have your own server.

Being on a less packed server can help out with preventing server downtime but is especially important if your site requires a lot of resources to be utilized on the server-side along with a lot of traffic. An example of this would be a database-driven site using server-side coding like PHP or ASP where coding is being executed to do various tasks as well as checking or pulling information from a database. The downside to being on these less packed servers is that the price for hosting will go way up. Shared hosting is inexpensive because there are so many customers on each server and this is bound to occasionally cause server downtime. The key is to find a balance between what you need to do, how much you’re willing to pay, and how important stability in your site is.

Another factor I’d like to mention, but at the same time I don’t want to sound prejeduce because that’s not how I am. But a personal preference of mine is to not deal with a company that outsources overseas. Not that I have anything against anybody overseas, but communication within a Web Hosting organization will generally be better without that factor.

I really hope this helps your decision in finding a Web Host. I’m hosted with Fatcow.com (yes an affiliate link) as you may have noticed. Recommended if you’re looking for a Shared Web Host.

Source : http://www.techescape.net/2011/01/09/finding-web-hosts-without-server-downtime/