by LunaWeb

What to Look Out for in a Singapore Web Hosting Provider

What are some of the things you should look for when choosing a web hosting provider in Singapore? There are many web hosting providers in Singapore, some are large reputable web hosting company, while others are setup by one man show. Choosing the wrong web hosting company can result in serious damage to your company email communication , reputation and loss of profit, when badly managed servers goes down.

Reliability and speed of access

Not only the web host be reliable and fast, it should guarantee its uptime (the time when it is functional). Look for a minimum of 99.5% uptime guarantee. The host should provide some sort of refund (eg prorated refund or discount) if it falls below that figure. Without that guarantee, the web hosting company will have little incentive to ensure that its servers are running all the time.

Support Level and Team Strength

When you host your company email and web site services with a budget hosting company running on one man show, there will be times the owner is sick or away due to un-forecast issues, disaster start to happen when no one is monitoring the server; your email goes down, your customer cannot reach you; your email bounce; customers starting to doubt your company reliability; you lose the customer. You tried to contact the owner, but to no avail. There you are, left hanging with nobody to turn to fanatically. Such scenario have happened many times! (many customers who switched to us is partly due to such problem they faced with their previous web host) . Always check with your prospective web hosting provider on the team strength and support you will be getting when signing up for their services. Sometimes you want to save a few dollars, ask yourself how much your company reputation is worth compared to the money you can save.

Age of the Web Hosting Company in Business

While we always encourage more entrepreneurs in Singapore to setup their own businesses. A new startup some times may not have the level of experience and funding to provide top notch hosting and network infrastructure that your company can heavily depend on. A company with more than 10 years of experience is likely able to meet the expectation of support and reliability than a newly setup company with less than 2 years of experience. Find out the year your prospective hosting company begin their business.

Network and Hosting Server Infrastructure

The most simple server setup for hosting business is simply getting a single server, host it in a datacentre, install Cpanel (control panel) and starts to offer hosting. Now this is far from a highly reliable network setup. Many hosting company owner fail to troubleshoot problems when it arises within the server due to software or hardware problem. Learn the types of server hosting environment your hosting provider is offering. Generally, a clustered network of servers give you more assurance than a single server environment which can goes down anytime due to software or hardware problem.

Who are the customers of your web hosting provider?

Always find out from your prospective hosting provider who is actually using their services. With customer list of MNCs and SMEs, it offers more assurance that big corporate names who use their services are provided with proper and reliable service, you can ensure the same level of service is likely to happen to your company when you sign up with them.

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