Questions to ask a potential shared hosting provider

Choosing the wrong shared hosting provider can be a nightmare. Crappy policies, frequent outages, and not getting enough storage or bandwidth for your money can all make your life difficult. By asking a potential host some relevant questions you can avoid that hosting nightmare and instead settle with a reliable host that provides good value for money with both services and support.

How much space does your package offer?

While most shared hosting providers will have a clause in their terms & conditions stating you cannot use the space to store audio and video files, most don’t enforce this for small amounts but if you intend hosting your own photo gallery and you link to your hi-res images, you’ll start eating into your allowance so check if there is any charge for going over and what the difference is between the next package up. At Selfless Mind Hosting our hosting packages come with either 2Gb, 8Gb or 20Gb and if that’s not enough we can tailor a package to suit you.

How much data transfer does your package offer?

Some shared hosting providers offer unlimited bandwidth, very often there is a catch in the small print, so check it carefully as often going over even by one Megabyte or two can be very expensive.
At Selfless Mind Hosting our packages come with 20Gb, 80Gb and 200Gb per month as standard but if you think you might go over, let us know and we can work something out.

Will your shared host offer Unix or Windows?

Nowadays more and more people want to run a Windows server, usually there’s not much difference in price but you’ll find things like database add-ons are chargeable, this is down to a licence from Microsoft being required, Windows isn’t open source!

At Selfless Mind Hosting we understand everyone’s needs are different, that is why we offer both Unix and Windows environments.

Do you use in-house servers and tech support?

At Selfless Mind Hosting our servers are housed in one of the UK’s most state-of-the art data centres. There, a dedicated team of engineers and technicians monitor things 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to ensure that when something goes wrong, which it has a tendency to do, they can spring into action ensuring that any downtime is minimal.

Once you have the answers to all the questions above, you can confidently compare hosting providers and choose the one that offers the best value for your money.