If
your websites are important to
you,
you
should select your Host
carefully
Out
of thousands of websites selling
hosting on the Internet today,
only a tiny fraction of these
sites belong to data centres. The
bulk of these sites are run by
their channel partners, resellers
and sub resellers.
The safest source for a reliable
hosting service would be to buy
direct from a data centre. But
this is usually very expensive -
and it's NOT because it is
the very best service. Data
centres could not stay in
business if they only sold to end
users. Their business module is
based on reselling almost all of
their resources through hundreds
of channel partners such as X9
Internet. It would therefore be
dangerous for them to compete
with their partners, so they set
their enduser prices
high.
A channel partner offers an
excellent service with good
support at a very low price and
can do so because it does not
have huge datacenter expenses.
This is your ideal hosting
provider.
When
choosing a hosting reseller
provider, always check that they
are a fully accredited Nominet
member. Otherwise, signing up
could be risky. There are
hundreds of socalled 'providers'
who will offer you a real cheap
deal, with no support and when
the server gets full, your host
and your websites may
disappear.
It is virtually impossible to
tell if a web host is a data
center, channel partner,
reseller, sub-reseller or just a
bloke who is doing this from home
for a bit of beer money, when all
have excellent informative and
professionally looking web sites.
It would be best to look at their
domains and to do a whois to see
when they were registered. We
registered x9internet.co.uk in
2000 - so we've been around for a
while.
The best tip is to look for the
accredited Nominet member shield
on a website which offers
hosting. If you can find this on
a website, that host can be
trusted, even if it's a new host.
We have been a member since
1999.
You can also try the review
sites, but that will require
careful consideration as they are
not accurate or reliable. In
general, review sites are mainly
used by disgruntled customers to
complain or let off steam when
they are disappointed with a
host. For example, a customer is
careless with his login
credentials and gets his website
hacked. The web host disables his
website to prevent the hackers
from causing further damage to
the server and informs the
customer that he needs to
re-upload his website from his
backup into a clean account with
a new password. But, he did not
make a backup and no longer has
the original website files. Now
he is really angry because the
web host refuses him access to
his hacker infected files on the
server and he runs off to the
review sites to write something
nasty about the web host. Many
web hosts combat this by writing
lots of their own 'good' reviews
to counter the bad reviews.
Therefore, exercise caution when
considering web host reviews as
part of your selection
process.
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