Whether you run a popular business website or a niche blog that gets no more than a couple of visitors each day, you want to look professional, and you need an affordable, trouble-free customer experience. While most hosting providers do offer reasonable service, clients do sometimes experience cause for complaint. It’s important to keep a record of problems as they turn up. At the end of each year, it makes sense put some thought into whether you’re satisfied, or need to take your business elsewhere. There are plenty of top-quality hosting services, and it makes no sense to stay with a service that doesn’t give you what you need.
Reliable hosting review services exist, and you can usually quickly find the information that you need about any service that you may want to consider. You need to know when you’ve had enough, however, and when it’s time to switch.
Audit those prices, and know when they are too high
Hosting services often review their pricing plans, and some do become more expensive, for no perceptible improvement in service. There are great services that start at two dollars a month for a basic plan, and mediocre ones go as high as five dollars a month. It’s important to review your plan against what the competition offers, and to switch if you believe that the difference in pricing is high enough to justify the inconvenience of moving.
You find that the customer service isn’t up to scratch
If you have complex hosting needs, or are simply a beginner in need of some handholding, good customer service is an essential. There are several great web hosts today that offer instant human customer service, and there’s no need to go with a provider that has customers hanging around on hold, or one that finds it hard to deliver the level of service that you need.
You need something that your current service doesn’t have
Hosting services publish specifics about the kind of physical servers that the use – the operating system, the processor, the amount of RAM and so on. Whether you need an AS400 server, special technologies such as Perl or ASP, VPS, Ruby on rails, cloud hosting or a lot of disk space or processing power, you can usually find out easily if your hosting service has it. If it doesn’t, or if it’s clear that your site is too slow, you should begin to look elsewhere.
You get too much spam in your email
If you host your email on your hosting provider’s email service, their spam filters are an important consideration. If you find that you get too much spam, you should quickly look for another service. Antispam technologies are far too easily available today for anyone to have to waste time with inferior service.
Competent hosting service is an essential for business today, and it’s important to be alert for a drop in service quality. The success of your business does depend at least in part on a great website.
Jade Harvey writes about website matters, from installing a blog to doing maintenance tasks. Her articles are aimed at webmasters who are either running a site as a hobby, or running a small business and don’t have a tech team on hand.