Choose a Web Hosting Service For Your Blog – Part II

A few days ago, I talked about the pains and challenges of finding a good web host for a blog. I have personally been through a whole lot of web hosts before settling down with Dream Host. In reality, no web host is perfect. All web hosting providers are going to suffer from outages, and every single company out there is going to have something that you won’t like. So, if you are too picky about your hosting service, you may want to get your own server.

I was guilty of being too picky when I got my first web hosting account. I remember I signed up for IX Web Hosting. At the time, IX Web Hosting was considered the best shared hosting service provider by most reputable sites. The hosting plans were rich and a whole lot of free bonuses were offered with each hosting plan. But I made the mistake of signing up for a Windows account than a Linux one. As great as Wordpress is, it is not going to perform to its maximum on a Windows-based server. That’s just a fact. There are web hosts out there that offer compelling Windows hosting for Wordpress. But, why would you want to use a MS hosting account for an open source CMS such as Wordpress. My relationship with IX Web Hosting didn’t last more than a year as I was frustrated with all the issues that I had with Wordpress on Windows. So if you are looking for a web host for your blog, make sure you understand the technologies that work the best with your blogging platform.

I then had a chance to work with 1&1 hosting. At first things were smooth, but 1&1 starting charging me twice for my domains, and Wordpress started malfunctioning on their servers. When I asked their customer service about my issue, they told me that my theme folders were on one server and the rest of my Wordpress blog was on another. I found that to be a strange explanation and a sign that things were not going to work out with 1&1. After a few months of going back and forth with the customer service, I decided to get out of my contract. I learned a couple of lessons from working with these guys:

• Never work with a company that makes it hard to cancel your service: if your web host makes it easy for people to sign up for an account, it should make it easy for them to cancel their accounts as well. If your host is trying to keep you on board by making the cancellation process impossible, then it just does not get the concept of customer service.
• Never work with a hosting provider that does not answer your questions properly on a timely fashion: when I signed up for 1&1 hosting plans, I was rushing into it due to a limited time promotion that they were running at the time. Had I contacted the customer service before signing up for 1&1’s hosting plan, I probably would have figured out if the decision to work with the company was the right decision for my business.

After 1&1, I spend a couple of months with a free hosting service. The hosting was actually great, but I wanted more support, and that’s how I got hooked up with Dream Host. Now, Dream Host’s shared hosting is not perfect, and there are minor issues that happen time to time. But, the service has been reliable, and it has met my criteria for a good web host:

• Great features
• Great price
• Great support
• Great documentation

Dream Host has the best support in the world. There is no doubt in my mind that is the case. I have never gone more than a couple of hours before getting an answer to my e-mails. They also let you call them, which is a plus. But what I like about the folks at Dream Host is the fact that they are straight with their customers. For instance, I wanted to run a social networking script on my hosting account, but the script was too slow. The folks at Dream Host told me that my hosting plan was not the right one for that script, and they offered to help me move to a better plan (they told me how much it would cost and why I should do it to get the best result). I call that great service.

At the end of the day, you need to do your due diligence before signing a contract with a web host. Dream Host has been very good to me, but I am sure there are a few other good hosts out there that offer great service to their customers. There is more to a good web host than a great name, and that’s the lesson I learned the hard way.

In the third part of this series, I will discuss things that you need to look for in a web hosting service before signing a contract with a hosting company. Stay tuned.