Janette Toral
Digital Filipino

MANY folks start blogging using free services available online. However, if you are serious and want to build your own identity right away, including customization of features, you can sign-up in any third party blog hosting services.

Selection should be made based on criteria that are important to you. This includes (in no particular order):

1. Technical support

Do they have personnel available 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Does the web hosting offer guaranteed response time to emergency support request and to e-mails for technical support? The web hosting service should be able to provide information as to how soon can the web host can act on technical support concerns and other queries.

At the minimum, there should be direct telephone support or live chat available for at least eight hours. If phone calls are answered by an answering machine system, response time should be mentioned.

2. Back-up

There should be incremental backups, at least once every 24 hours, and full backups weekly. In case your web host server crashes, it should have the capability to restore its content. As a precautionary measure, make sure that you have back-up copies of your site. I’ve seen site owners who weren’t able to back up their content for quite sometime. As a result, when the web server crashes, so goes their entire content.

A page on the web site where customers can check network/system status will be a nice feature but it is optional.

3. Company background

The company must be in the business for at least 12 months. Start-up companies can also be considered provided they can demonstrate their stability in terms of resources and infrastructure. Ideally, they should offer a 30-day or longer no-questions-asked money back guarantee if you’re not satisfied.

If web hosting service is offered by a reseller, it must offer full-time hosting support and meet other criteria mentioned here.

It would be good to see that the web hosting company already has a track record. Check their currently hosted professional web sites with contact emails as references so you can verify them.

4. Reliability

The web hosting service must be able to provide you an outline of their Internet connection (e.g. T-1, T-3, etc). They should be able to identify their Internet backbone providers, if necessary, for verification purposes. Web hosting companies that are hesitant in providing such information are highly questionable in terms of its reliability.

You should find out as well if the web hosting service has backup power in case of power outages.

It is also nice to see, although unnecessary, downtime statistics in the past year posted on the site (and regularly updated)
and information on speed of internal network.

5. Features

The web hosting service should offer various services—such as auto-responders, unlimited alias forwarding, explain various accounts and expandability options, client’s use of own CGI Scripts, DNS parking, web-based account management area, secure server for e-commerce, NT and/or UNIX hosting, mailbox, analytics, software applications available for installation and database support, among others.

6. Usage/Access Logs

Access logs must be made available to clients. The log analysis software can be provided by the web hosting firm. There should be a minimum time for these access logs to be accessible.

7. Payment Options

Web hosting services should be able to provide a variety of options for clients who want to make payments. They can either be online, check/money order or credit card.

8. Set-up fee

How much do they charge upon sign-up and what services are included?

9. Monthly fee

How much are the monthly fees required to be paid for the plan you have chosen?

10. Termination clause

What are the mechanics for services termination? Are there fees to be paid?

11. Bandwidth / Transfer Limit

If you often have files (especially photos and videos) available for download, you may need to have higher bandwidth/transfer limit.

The bottom line here is due diligence. Don’t just avail of something free or cheap without checking its capability to support you.

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