before choosing a hosting company

[varfolomey]

Guys, I'd like to know which features do you take into consideation while choosing a hosting company? What are the most important for you?

[ian]

For me personally, they must own their own data center, which means they can handle the growth to a fully dedicated server, and also is an indication of their size/financial backing. Also how long they have been in business/how many customers they have, etc

[akropoliss77]

For me it's important the whereabouts of the hosting company, kind of support they provide, range of prices and reviews of them on the forums.

[zkiller]

one word... infrastructure.

second would be support and features offered/pre-installed.

[eMonsterhost]

I think solid server performance and knowledgable customer support would be the most important factors.

[varfolomey]

Originally Posted by zkiller

one word... infrastructure.

What do you mean under infrasrtucture?

[leighmcc]

Definitely support. Gone are the days when 24 hour support was good. You want your web host to reply quickly, within the hour. Phone support can be helpful in some circumstances, but it isn't that important, most good web hosts will have a ticketing system to track issues/questions sent to support. Oh and make sure that if a company says 24/7 support, it means 24/7/365 days of the year. There are some webhosts who don't have support on public holidays. It can be really annoying when something goes wrong on that ONE day!

If a web host just uses email for technical support, its usually a bad sign.

Cheers,
Leigh

[bermuda]

Some points are very important, making sure that the web hosting is a real hosting provider or simply reseller of another company.

Also, the uptime status is very important, even more important than the web space and monthly bandwidth, because frequent downtimes may mean problems in search engines and people leaving your website.

[Saiduchi]

Support is the most important apart from their package/price. The company doesnt have to own their own datacenter, as long as they can provide good service and support. Not many companies have their own datacenters but they have a good reputation in the hosting business.

[Slushie]

The main things I look at for a good host are the time in business, at least one year, but more always helps, I need to know they'll be around.
Next is their uptime, I need my sites to have great uptime.
Another is the price to plan ratio. I want a good amount of space and bandwidth. If its too low, I won't even consider the host, and if its too high, like 10 gigs of space and 500 gigs of bandwidth for like $7.95, I leave, that is WAY to much overselling.
Next is reviews, if the hosting company has been around for a year or more, it should have some good or negative reviews somewhere.

As for support, I'd of course like good support, and a fast response, within an hour or two, but that doesn't really effect my decision. I'd rather have a host with great uptime, reliability, and great packages and decent support, then a company with decent uptime, reliability, decent packages and amazing support.

As for the company owning datacenters, or their own server, that helps a bit.
But I think I guy on a reseller account, with a good business plan, might be a better host then a guy who rents a dedicated server, who's too say the dedicated server guy won't be able to handle the high monthly server costs, and your site goes down, while the reseller guy can handle the lower payments, and upgrade to a server when he has the customers and income too.