What do you look for in a host?

I know many of us have different things that we want out of our web hosting. What do you look for when you are ordering web hosting? Is it reliability? Fast support? Cheap prices?

reliability over everything, i rather pay extra for a good service. i was lucky enough to find a cheap and reliable host that i have now been with for 30 months now which i asked that the other day. I have had it down 2-3 times over the years and if anything a few hours tops but i also have the admin there my personal administrator for my servers too so to me a trustworthy host.

Anyway to sum up good support and reliability is good then the location needs to be in the middle of your traffic so your going to need to do some personal marketing.

Speed is great but most data centers are good with that, no home servers either also make sure cpanel is part of the package as it makes your like easy.

really apart from that most are the same just few have better resources then others. When i find a good one i don't move unless forced too.

I say reliability, then fast support and a very good knowledge-base (Q&A area).

My current host never had any downtime and I had them for a year on one occasion and now I started a different site and it has being running for 2 months with them.

To tell about their support, they spent 9 hours rebuilding my MySQL database when I accidentally erased it without a back-up...

The minute I ever see a hosting company spammed here or in any other place, I immediately disregard it as credible.

I mostly look at the price tag and if I get what I need. Also I look at their reputation and others experience with the host.

I never pick a host saying "unlimited" bandwidth or something like that. And btw I have only had one host so far so I'm no professional picker with a ton of experience, but I think I made a good pick and are happy so far with the delivered/price ratio.

I concur. I immediately discount them altogether.

So you are saying you would not use a hosting service if you get 1 spam email or anything on your server. How do you calculate that!

1) The server is connected to the internet where billions of spam emails are sent per day which is only email btw but the chances are your going to get one eventually.

2) How much of your traffic is spam bots and crawlers and any other bot would consist of at least 20% and more of your traffic and visitors at a bare minimum.

3) Spamming Scripts are mostly custom built for scripts and servers and mostly sent out at random too, so really don't see how yo get past these automated scripts.

4) I am all most certain that your server is not bullet proof or in this case exploit proof and if you say yes it is then that is something everyone can laugh about as there is only 1 known computer that is 100% secure apart from taking the network cable out of the port.

5) Also Spammers have revised that we are getting better at protection so now 3rd world countries are joining in and doing things manually by hand in computer labs.

Just a few points of reference that i would like to bring up when ditching a hosting service that has no control over the unregulated internet that it is today and further more Spam is apart from the internet and i don't see how it is something that can be stopped, only reduced.

No, I'm saying that I won't buy goods or services from any company that engages in spamming.

The ability to send spam is not indicative of one's ability to host websites; they are quite different in both approach and architectural decisions.

In the business world, bots and crawlers are given little luxury traversing the site; they consume resources which are better spent int he production of income rather than to achieve gain for someone else. Artificially inflating one's page views or site visitors is not a qualitative measure of one's capacity or capability.


Not entirely certain what this point has to do with the original stance; that being one of defense of spammers as a litmus test for quality hosting.


Again, this point is completely irrelevant to the current topic. I am unable to discern where the conversation meandered around towards site security.
For the record, my servers are about as bullet-proof as they come, not withstanding the fact is still irrelevant to both my and Spork's original comments.



Spammers are among the lowest life forms traversing the internet. They feed off the misgivings and lack of education of the more learned, convincing countless to 'click here', often to their detriment. The very fact (as you so mention) that spam houses are incapable of controlling the content they themselves spew forth onto the Internet makes them all the more disreputable. If they are incapable of forcing their customers to follow a basic tenet of civility, they should not be in business in the first place... as such they will never get my money nor that of anyone whom I influence.

For hands down, the problem is they don't say that they spam and in some cases they get reported my mistake. It's really hard to find if a host spams or not.

For me in the beginning it was price, transparency, and professionalism.

Now I care more about reliability and speed.

for me, uptime is the most important thing.

Uptime and support. I hate it when my sites are down and especially when the support is not good. Since there's already a lot of competition in the web hosting world, good prices are no longer a problem

Be careful slow sites can be really bad too!

i would agree with the others.

but i think speed is a really important factor too for seo, so i would look into that when deciding on the hosting.

Try hosting your own website it has a great advantages, you have unlimited flexibility, you ca n choose your own hardware, operating system, database, and other tools.