What questions should I ask before choosing a web hosting company?

What type of support do you offer?

Once your site is up and running the most essential thing you need from your hosting company would be technical support. Different company offer various type of technical support based upon monthly fee and selection of plan. Some provide toll free or round the clock (24/7), other may provide email support or online manuals. Does your hosting company provide support over weekend? Ask yourself, how comfortable are you with company that provides only online manual as technical support? Hosting companies that do not provides technical support is not worth considering.

What sort of equipment and software are in place to ensure that my site is up? Smoothly operating Web site is a vital part of your business. You want to make sure that the web server and other hosting equipments are hooked up to an uninterrupted Power Supply. Does your hosting company have website monitoring service in place. Website monitoring automatically checks your servers on a regular basis and if there is a problem, you will be the first to know (via email, pager etc), so you can begin troubleshooting before your customers start calling you.

How do you backup data?

How often do you backup data?

Do you have any recovery mechanism?

The more often is better but you should be looking for that your web site host provider backs up every night. You should also keep an up to date copy of your web site host provider on your computer to be on the safe side.

How secure your servers are?

What measure you have taken to make sure your server will be secure from virus and hackers attack. Get details about anti-virus software, firewall and other security software installed on hosting server What are your uptime guarantees?

The best is 100% uptime (which I don’t think any company can offer). Most of the hosting company offers 99.5% uptime but anything lest then 99.5% is not worth considering.

Do they provide log files or Stats?

Most of the hosting company either provide log files or live status. You may want to make sure that whatever log files or status logs contain Information like how many people visited, when they arrived, how long they stay on a page, from where they arrive (search engine, other web site etc) and where they might be located. It also provide other information including their operating system, monitor size, browser etc.

What all is included in the monthly charge?

You need to know what the features of the account are. You also need to know what can you get for some extra fee. Probably you'll need additional disk space or bandwidth, or other feature like SSL, PHP etc in future, but you should know the prices right now. ?

Is there is any other hidden fee, service charge or setup changes? Do you provide any money back or similar kind of Guarantee?

If your website (pages and scripts) is already ready on you local machine, you need at least 7 to 10 days to test your site. You might lose first two to three days during DNS propagation and uploading pages. Always try to select a host that provides at least 10 days of money back guarantee.

How quickly you'll respond when I have questions?

Before choosing a hosting company contact them with a question (above questions or additional question you may have) and see how quickly they have an answer for you. That way you can get an idea how quickly they will respond in feature.