Ozbon Articles

Recently, we’ve worked with two completely different clients who have both somehow managed to pick remarkably bad hosting companies for their websites. In light of this, a few pointers for finding a decent hosting company.

• Check the hosting company’s website. If they can’t do this correctly (for example, non-working links, out of date content, etc.) then avoid them like the plague.
• If the hosting company make things incredibly difficult to do the simplest tasks, avoid them. Examples of this that we’ve seen include refusing to have a control panel for your domains and web set-up, instead preferring to do everything through their own technical staff. It’s also included security authorisations that needed to be faxed or posted through to the company
• If the hosting company provides non-standard (or even in one case recently, no) site management tools - WebLog analysis, so you know how many visitors your site is getting, or a Database management front-end like PHPMyAdmin - then avoid them.
• If the hosting company try to tie you in to long-term contracts with heavy penalty clauses for moving sites away - yes, avoid them.

Here at Ozbon we use (and recommend) a couple of highly reputable hosting companies, 34sp in the UK and DreamHost in the US. We’ve been using both of them now for upwards of four years, with no problems or issues at all.

There are plenty of other hosting companies out there, and we can (and do) work with most of them. But it doesn’t take much to check that they are at least vaguely competent.