Every one has hrrr stories Based on past mistakes - a list of the things to look for - and - to avoid 1- Let's start off with Uptime guarantees 2- Email Spam filters, including one's Webmail & IMAP accounts
Every ISP is different IMO - I have experience of ISPs that perform very well on your points 1 & 2 but fail on... 3 - No telephone support. If you can't ring up your ISP and discuss an issue 24/7 then you may be stuck with an email-only or web interface support. Most ISPs are happy to get a call and sort any issues there and then or "get on the case" straight away and let you know when it's resolved. If your site "goes down" every minute costs traffic and therefore revenue - make sure they can answer and deal with such problems within a "reasonable" response time. Getting a Service Level Agreement drawn up, agreed and signed is a good thing.
I learned a hard lesson, my first web host was endore.com. I paid a year in advance and then 2 months in the company disappeared. There was all this outrage, many customers were screwed, they were running businesses and lost everything. So anyway it's best to look at review sites, see what others are saying and do your research and try to avoid paying a year in advance, pay monthly. You never know what will happen.
And always have a backup of EVERYTHING. If you have a blog (like I do) or other dynamic content, make sure you backup your DB too...
Good advice. I never understand how people don't have a backup of their sites on their computer anyway. I create everything on my computer so I definitely have copies, everyone should follow suit! However I am bad when it comes to getting a DB backup. I guess I should start if I don't want to lose my blogs.
i always make sure that theyre not going to slug me a fortune if i go over bandwidth quota. I also look for much more space than i will ever need and make sure to check out sites that are also hosted by them to test how their servers respond. Ive not had to do it for a while, the host we use now rocks. Customer support is always replied to within about 2 hours, and they are genuinely nice people to deal with. i got stung by featureprice a while ago, lost my domain, and i tell you the frustration of sitting there without being able to do a thing is just horrible. Oh yeah, always make sure you host your domains away from your webhost, dont let them register a domain for you. The last one is a given, but you'd be surprised the amount of people that get sucked in by it.
There are several proven possibilties - None are a perfect panacea - but sometimes options are better than Nothing at all 1- Cache:www.url.com/ on Google for All your pages that have been cached by Google up to that date... http://216.239.41.104/search?hl=en&q=cache:forums.digitalpoint.com 2- Web.archive.org for all your pages and message boards, and guestbooks etc., that have been cached by Web.archive.org, (sometimes images can be retrieved)... There is Still time to get your historical sites http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ 3- type in the Url in Yahoo and use the Cache link if the Web pages have been cached in Yahoo.. http://66.218.71.225/search/cache?p...digitalpoint.com/&d=822B8749FA&icp=1&.intl=us 4- Several other databases offers Cache options too... Gigablast [archived copy] for Homepages... http://gigablast.com/get?q=http://forums.digitalpoint.com/&rtq=0&d=17090617182
i love SSH access and of course strictly Linux hosting ( or freeBSD once ) i have SSH since many years and impossible to imagine any host w/o SSH ! specially on larger sites or sites with many scripts or if you love to play admin and try features or improve security and chmod/cd/install scripts/compile scripts/rm/ ... etc a lot but also for site-back-ups from host to another host (scp) and many more features of work SSH ( in the worst telnet as substitute ) has proven most valuable to me in past years. talking host reviews ... after the recent host change ( early August 2004 ) i noticed that some ( actually most from the verified ones ) have host reviews without reference (URL) to the domain of the reviewer some of the reviews where all together published within a very few days in similar words/style letting me assume that ONE single person wrote all ( only top reviews and only w/o domain associated to that review ) ... and in another verified case of reviews with URL of customer's site i checked DNS of that reviewer's domain in the whois and found out that he moved meanwhile to another host i emailed to that host twice (it appear a better one to me ) and never got an answer. that host had about half of reviewers sites moved away from him ... i assume in such case that the initial quality failed to survive the first days/weeks/months. so i belief reviews only if the domain is known and still hosted in excess of a year with that host and appears to belong to another than the host itself.