2by4 - 6:45 pm on Jul 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

lfgoal, yep, once you land in a real hoster, you will never leave. No problems, close to 100% uptime [not 99%, that's upto 4 days down per year], 24/7 email/and or phone support, own datacenters, not outsourced junk.

There are very few hosters like this, and once you find one, your troubled hosting days are over.

Dead giveaways of bad hosting: unlimited anything, badly done hoster website, no real contact information. Uncontrolled mysql connections on shared hosting is another bad sign, which some people erroneously consider a good thing, since it means that their db driven site will be allowed to knock out the rest of the sites on a shared server because it's getting too much traffic to run on shared.

Many hosters will lie about owning their own datacenters by the way, or will word it in a way that makes it sound like they do when they don't.

Small hosters won't have access to the bandwidth/multiple data trunk lines that will keep your site up when serious network issues happen.

Check out who the best tech sites on the web are hosted by, usually that's good hosting, tomswardware.com, WebmasterWorld, etc. Not always though, as WebmasterWorld's recent issues with their previous hosting provider shows. But then again, WebmasterWorld isn't using them anymore...

[edited by: 2by4 at 6:58 pm (utc) on July 28, 2006]