Here are some of the most common problems to look out for when picking a website hosting provider.
Companies Going Bust
Hosting is a cut-throat business and there’s a lot of big sharks in the pond (looking at you GoDaddy). Big sharks can afford to cut prices to the bare minimum. It’s a lot of work maintaining infrastructure and it’s a job that requires experience. As you can imagine, it can get expensive and stressful managing hardware and servers.
Many smaller companies try to compete on price and end up selling their hosting far too cheap. In the long run, it’s not sustainable which results in companies going bust and their servers going offline.
Pick a host that has good ratings on sites such as Trustpilot. The longer the company has been around, the better. Even with good ratings and an older company, it’s no guarantee of long-term quality as the next points will show.
Company Buy Out
Hosting companies are often bought out by bigger companies. New companies come in, downsize staff and support teams, and don’t care much about the old company’s reputation and quality. We loved the company Site5 but they were bought by EIG in 2015. Support after the buy-out was non-existent and EIG moved server locations to the United States without even informing customers. It was pretty rude.
Scaling Problems
The unfortunate reality of web hosting is that there are always limited resources. A hosting company may start with good intentions, great customer service, and reasonably priced packages.
Over time, their servers may become overloaded causing outages and downtime for customers. This usually happens once word spreads about their great service and prices and they grow too fast without being able to maintain their servers. This happened to a company we worked with for years Arvixe. They tried their best to keep on top of maintenance, but it’s a hard job without the proper resources and time and the hosting quality suffered.
Cloud Hosting
Our own hosting platform is on the cloud, so we are no longer dependent on what other companies are doing. This gives peace of mind and also means we can pick and chose the best hosting elements to weave together.
If you choose to keep your current host, WP-Ensure monitors your site constantly for downtime and in our monthly reports, we will let you know of any problems that should be resolved with your current host. If need be you can always move to our platform later.
