What Constitutes Good Hosting?

What do you look for in a hosting company? What services do you have to have, and what services are only "bait" to draw you in, but which you may or may not ever use?

1. Reliability. If the service doesn't guarantee at least 99.99 percent up time, then look for a better service. All servers need to be rebooted from time to time, Windows servers more than Linux, but this only take about 10 minutes at most once in a while. If your email or site is regularly down, your host is not serving you.

2. Customer Support. A big company can offer 24 / 7 support, but when their support personnel can't do a thing because it's the way the system works, and they have no ability to adjust it, then I have a problem with it. Good support is essential when something goes wrong, but you should not need it often. And the system should be simple and usable enough that you shouldn't need to call support just to accomplish a basic task. It should be even more rare for someone like me to need support, but unfortunately, I seem to have to call in every time I deal with GoDaddy's hosting. Look for personalized support, where you can talk to a person when you have a problem and don't get lost in one of those endless "automated telephone system" loops. When you've got a problem, it's frustrating enough trying to deal with the site, you don't want to have to deal with an automated system guessing at the menu choices.

3. A Comprehensive Control Panel. You should be able to control the features of your website and be able to set up whatever you need, from subdomains to how email is handled. This can allow you to upload files via your web browser, set up protected directories, add new email addresses and autoresponders, and much more. You shouldn't have to spend ages digging through advertising to find what you need, either.

4. If you're putting together a website for a business, good statistics are extremely important.  I'm a web professional for over 10 years, and I still can't make head nor tail of the "standard" stats that GoDaddy provides as part of their hosting setup--one has to pay $2.99/month for usable stats on their system. At least one (usable) statistics program should be available, one that gives you "referrers" (so you know where your website visitors are coming from), unique visitors, repeat visitors, and so on. "Hits" are very misleading and a waste of time as far as I'm concerned; hits are what all those counters you see on some web pages count.*

Toner Design offers at least 2 forms of stats on every site (AWstats and Webalizer, plus a 3rd type on Linux sites). Plus, for $3.00/month offer Urchin 5 Web Analytics, well known in the web world for premium web analytics. (Urchin was bought up by Google, so you know it has something worthwhile to offer.)  But you don't need to have Urchin, you can get along just fine with the other included stats and know what's going on with your site. Urchin just adds some tricks that help one in figuring out what folks are doing on their site and what path they follow.

5. Custom Error Pages. This can make a site look very professional, especially if the "Page Not Found" (404) error page has a form on it that allows the user to tell you what happened, so you don't lose them but instead give them a way to let you know they had a problem.

6. Programming Languages should be available and usable. You should be able to run scripts in the most common programming languages for the platform you choose, usually Linux or Windows. Such languages for Linux include Perl and PHP, on Windows add ASP, ASP.NET. These should run in any directory where you want them to run, although there are good reasons for using a cgi-bin, which brings us to the next requirement:

*How hits are counted: Each image on a page, and there are many you don't see that are used for spacing purposes, counts as a hit, and the page itself counts as a hit. Not only this but each time the user returns to a page, such as the home page, all these hits are counted all over again. So if the page plus images counts as 9 hits, and the user comes back to it several times while reading content on your website, you can build up several hundred hits with just one user/visitor.