Hard Questions to Ask while Choosing a Shared Hosting Provider
By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News NetworkTuesday, July 12, 2005
In this article I cover the hard questions to ask (checklist) while choosing a shared hosting provider.
These questions are gathered over the years and through hard experience with different shared hosting providers. You may not get everything from one provider. However you will know from this checklist what compromises you are making and you can knowingly make them.
Hard Questions to ask to Shared Hosting Providers
Note: You are better off writing an email to their sales address with a copy of the following.
- How many email accounts do you provide?
- Do you provide a catch-all account?
- Any restrictions on space per account or size of attachments?
Site Access
Ftp - File Transfer Protocol
- How many ftp accounts do you provide?
- Do you provide anonymous ftp access?
- What are the space restrictions for anonymous ftp folder?
SSH/Telnet
Do you provide SSH or Telnet access?
Note: SSH is preferable.
Do you allow password protected directories (using htaccess)?
Do you allow PHP/JSP/ASP (substitute your favorite programming environment)?
Do you provide space beyond web accessible directories?
General
Are you the upstream provider or a retailer?
What are your backup policies?
Does it cost to retrieve backups?
How frequently are your files backed up?
Do you provide static IP address? Does it come included or at an additional cost?
Do you provide free domain registration with the package?
Note: Even if you have a .com domain you can use it to register say a .net or .org domain for your site.
How many domains can I park?
How many sub-domains are allowed?
What is the hard disk space allocated?
How much maximum bandwidth is allocated?
Beyond the maximum bandwidth does it block access or allow requests to go through and charge for it later?
Do you maintain spare servers to move users who are say hogging out the CPU or memory to allow them to sort their memory/cpu utilization issues or do you simply shut them down?
Do you allow cron jobs?
Note: This is useful to run jobs periodically on the server. Trust me you need it.
Do they provide cgi-bin access?
Note: This is useful to run your own scripts.
Note 2: Do not bother about having a certain script of other. You can always download and install it easily.
Next in this series I will cover VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting.
