What are the things you find important to a hosting company and in what order? 1. Price - lowest cost possible 2. Tech support - If you have an issue, you can get hold of somebody competent to resolve 3. Reliable Network with little to no downtime 4. Company thats been around for some time, not a newcomer, one that wont disappear overnight what else?
Support is most important many providers are almost equal in service but support is where it brings difference
My order would be: 1- Uptime 2- 24-7 Support 3- Price Uptime & Support don't come cheap... so cheaper is not always better.
Reliablity and support is most important for me, i wont mind even if it is expensive but services has to be top notch.
All hosting companies were at that point some time...if we thought in that mentality Hostgator, Servage and the others wouldn't be where they are!
My main concern would be customer support, I've had bad experiences with customer support on some hosts.
Affordable package. Its useless if the hosting company meet all the requirement you said but their price is $100/month for 100MB space and 1GB bandwidth.
I think it's important that a hosting company does not just suspend your account and give your personal information away. I have heard plenty of companies receive a takedown request or an email saying "OMG!! This guy stole my content" and they just delete his website without even looking into it.
I think that live support is one of the most important things, and also reliability! If you don't have either of those things then don't start a hosting company
Price is not a big deal to me personally, if the host can provide good support & service then every penny I pay will be worth it. Live support is not necessary but good response times via tickets is, no one likes to wait 1-3 days just to get an issue resolved.
1. Quick setup - within 1 business day - I can't wait around , I Need it now. 2. No oversold bandwidth. ( I use all of it and expect what it says) 3. No downtime. 4. Accepts Paypal. Support is really at my bottom of the list. I find the more support there is the more the servers will cost. I'm not really keen on paying for something I dont' use since I'm pretty technically inclined and don't need it.
As many people said good and quick support, uptime is a major factor. Pricing decent, you see alot of $1 a year for hosting on DP but you rarely see one of them last longer then a month or two. Imo people are ready to spend a couple extra dollars for better hosting. In this business you get what you pay for. And yes people usually tend to go for a company thats been in business 6+ months. However you see alot of foolish people in the hosting area of this site run to the $1 hosts and then bitch and whine and repeat it over again without learning. Goodluck with your company and I wish you the best of luck. One more tip, rig up a support system to page you this worked great for me when I was the only one running my business. It would wake me up to reply to a support ticket how ever in the end I figured loosing sleep for a (usually stupid) question isn't worth it and hired a few staff members for this project.
I personally like when hosting company provides its customers with discount coupons and specials! This technique is also very important in marketing strategy.