Selecting Your Web Hosting Provider

When you select your web hosting provider, you'll need to consider one that provides servers that have raid redundancy. Servers are basically hardware, and hardware is pronged to failure, therefore, having an adequate backup plan is essential. Furthermore, it's just a matter of time before the server will fail and leave you up a creek without a paddle.

The next thing to consider is, does your hosting provider do daily/weekly backups of their servers? Furthermore, are those backups kept off site? On-site backups are helpful to recover your data from major hardware failure, such as a raid controller card. However, an off-site backup, would provide you with a solution to recover from such things as, tornado's, hurricanes, etc.

When you select a web hosting provider, these are things that you need to know. Therefore, if their web page doesn't make it clear or doesn't provide this information, you'll need to ask them. Since hosting has become so competitive, finding a provider that offers at hardware raid and on-site backups is not that hard to do. If your data is valuable, and you can't afford to lose it, then you'll need to make sure about off-site backups as well. Furthermore, it is well worth it, even if it costs a little extra!

Another thing to consider is, what is their hardware replacement time factor? Many hosting providers advertise that they provide a 24 hour or less, replacement solution for their servers that fail. Therefore, you'll want to consider what kind of a time frame you'll need and select an appropriate host provider.

Nobody expects their website to go down. However, if it does, one needs a backup solution to get you up and going again. Having a total backup solution it place, could save you a lot of time and money. What is your backup solution, are you able to recover?

Additional thoughts:
Never store your backups on the same server that hosts your web site. If you do, I suggest that you download those backups to your local computer on a daily basis. There are times that you can't recover all the data off a server, even if it has hardware raid configuration. Therefore, you'll end up losing some or all of your data. It is best to also have encrypted backups that are on a backup server, if you want a total backup solution.

Hope this blog post was helpful to you, "Selecting Your Web Hosting Provider."  Be sure to share this post with your friends on Twitter. Furthermore, I appreciate your time that you have spent here!

Spunky Jones.

1. Are you extremely unhappy with your current web hosting provider?
2. Is it better to have a shared IP or dedicated IP address?
3. .htaccess Tutorial – How to Create a .htaccess file
4. Tracking your website PHP Errors, via the .htaccess file
5. Maximizing your “Alexa traffic” using the more tag
6. 404 File Not Found Error Page!