But what do you ask when you sign up to a hosting provider to avoid these issues as much as possible?
What are the common issues when it comes to hosting? And what to ask about them?
Firstly, we need to be realistic. At the moment, hosting is managed – somewhere along the line – by humans. And we all make mistakes. These mistakes can be mitigated but we do need to flag that an error-free service isn’t available. But, how your hosting provider deals with these issues is also a consideration.
When it comes to common issues, here are some of the things that we’d recommend you ask before signing up:
- Downtime – Understanding the uptime is an obvious one and make sure you can see the guaranteed rate and monitor it! But, understanding how your hosting provider manages planned and unplanned downtime is also important. For example, we would always provide you with updates and scheduled times, out of hours, for planned downtime. For unplanned downtime, we have a range of monitoring mechanisms in place. These are designed to flag any instances of a site going down and then switching to our back-up hosting to ensure a near-seamless service. This is then monitored and investigated by our team to see what the issue is and what we need to do to make sure our customers have an issue fixed before they detect it.
- Website speed – Another key consideration for agencies and businesses is website speed. As you know this isn’t just the responsibility of hosting providers, building a website or app in the optimum way will help keep your website loading quickly. However, you might want to ask your potential hosting provider what they can do to help website speed? Will they proactively work with you to identify solutions? Or monitor website speed? Or is it something that they leave to you? Our aim is to work as an extension of your time so understanding your requirements and plans helps us to put together the optimum hosting environment for you and your clients.
- Support response time – We found that nearly 60% of our survey respondents had to wait over an hour and up to a day for a response from their hosting provider. A potential cost to your agency and your clients. Prostack would recommend asking your potential hosting provider for a report on their response times to see the average wait. Or, ask a technical question of their sales team. How long does it take to get a response that isn’t a generic answer? Feel free to test it out via our Live Chat or support desk first, we pride ourselves on answering quickly and effectively, our aim is to have an answer to you within five minutes.
What other issues or features to ask your potential hosting provider about?
While downtime, website speed and response times are the main considerations to discuss when picking a provider there are a few other things we’d also recommend:
- Back-ups. Ask how your hosting provider will manage back-ups? Do they take them regularly? Can they be restored if the worst should happen? Mitigating this risk before it occurs is definitely something we recommend.
- Migration. It is likely that this is not your first hosting provider. If that’s the case, then we’d recommend you understand how they will help you move your sites from your current host to the new one. And if they will help at all! If you are running an agency, this could be a valuable time-saving for you and your team.
- 24/7 support. What hours does your potential hosting provider operate? And do they operate certain hours with a ‘holding’ team or can you get an expert response around the clock? As well as checking their operating hours, we’d recommend testing this out before you switch to see what type of responses you receive.
- Monitoring. This might seem an obvious one but isn’t something that every host provides. Check how and what they are monitoring on your hosting environment and across their full system. Can they spot an issue before you do and fix it? How many automatic checks do they have? And how many human checks as well?
- Audit. One thing that Prostack provides that our agencies and businesses have found incredibly useful is a hosting audit. This allows us to analyse your current hosting environment and recommend a new one as well as providing you with the benefits that this new set-up will bring. What will your potential hosting provider do for you?
Anything else to ask?
While we’ve covered a whole range of questions above there might be two more that are worth asking:
- Environmental focus – Ask your potential hosting provider for their environmental policy and accreditations. Do they match your environmental values? Or add to them?
- Full management – Depending on the skillset of your team this might not be a necessary question but how much do you want your team involved in setting up the hosting environment? A fully managed hosting environment provides all server configuration for you leaving your agency to do what it does best and develop.
If you’re still wondering what to ask your potential hosting provider then why not download and read our recent report: What agencies need to know about hosting or talk to our team via LiveChat. ProStack are the human face of hosting, we’re happy to answer any question that you might have.