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Advice & Tips

Monitor your bill
As your site grows, so will your traffic. If your agreement is not set for the appropriate traffic levels, you may find yourself paying a lot more for additional bandwidth. Adjust as necessary.

Price does not rule
Make sure not to let price wholly dictate your choice of services. The better services will have quality equipment and enough servers for their customer base. The cheaper they are, the less likely it is that you're getting what each dollar is worth — and your Web site may suffer for it.

Security
When dealing with credit card numbers or other sensitive data, make sure you download them to your location with an encrypted file transfer program. There is no worse way to lose a customer than to have to call them if your site gets hacked.

Future predictions
When choosing among services, remember to factor in features you plan to add in the near future. Switching services takes a reasonable amount of effort and is not something you want to do simply for the sake of saving a few hundred dollars.

Find out about uptime guarantees
Nothing's perfect, but if you can get your host to guarantee a percentage of uptime, which is the amount of time that the service is working and available, you'll have a leg to stand on if anything does go wrong. These uptime guarantees, which should be in the high 90s, are usually included in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Talk to references
References should be companies with the same type of site you are considering putting up and should have been with the hosting company for at least six months. Talk to at least three for a well-rounded sense of experiences.