If you’re not a techie, choosing where your website will live can be a daunting task. For you, making the right decision is paramount, because you’re not going to be able to pick up and leave like someone who knows how to backup a MySQL database, and that you don’t need a driver’s license to do it.
My #1 recommendation for choosing the right web host: Ask an expert.
And I don’t just mean any “expert.” Your friend’s brother who sells stuff on Ebay is not going to be the kind of web hosting expert that you need. Here are some qualifications for your expert:
- Needs to be a techie with experience in hosting websites like to yours. In other words, if your aunt sells a couple of hair ribbons in her Etsy shop, she’s not going to be able to help you sell $80,000 in products from your website each month without crashing the server. Ideally, your expert will have experience working with sites the same size (traffic, bandwidth, etc) as yours larger.
- Needs to have worked with more than one web host. I know, it’s tempting to go to that colleague who has a complementary, or even competitive site, and go with the host they are using. But if they’ve only used one host, and only hosted one site, they could be experiencing issues they don’t realize they have, like rude staff, or unusually long wait times for issues.
- Needs to understand the issues that can arise from bad hosting. If you end up with a bad host, you could find yourself without any customer service, customer support people who are rude, at best, and more downtime than uptime. (Downtime is where your site cannot be accessed from the Internet.) You could end up with a really slow website and no resolution from the company.
- Must understand your site’s unique needs. Do you need to host a podcast each week, with audio files that people will download and listen to frequently? Do you need a robust ecommerce solution that will put a lot of strain on a server? Make sure your expert understands these issues when recommending a web host.
When I talk to small business owners about their websites, I make sure I find out about their unique needs, how their website is performing now and what their goals are for the future. I then evaluate their website in terms of whether or not I feel that my team can provide the website hosting that they need. If not, I recommend that they go somewhere else.
Most often though, we can handle what the business owner needs, since we offer shared hosting accounts, VPS and dedicated servers. Our support staff is friendly and knowledgeable, and we’re willing to go the extra mile to make sure you get what you need. We also offer at least two different options — we teach you how to do the task for free, or we offer to do the task for you for a reasonable rate.
If you have any questions about hosting your website, contact me today about your web hosting needs.
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Jenn Cangelosi is owner of 
Great advice Michelle! I agree with you on all points
People like to take recommendations from people they trust, but the people they know and trust don’t always know all that they should about the advice their giving, do they?
This is so true, Kelly.
People also tend to trust those who are just like them, instead of trusting those who have more experience, or who are further down the path they are wanting to travel.
It’s the difference between taking car repair advice from someone who owns a car just like yours — or taking advice from someone who has spent the past 10 years working on cars just like yours and has been under the hood of hundreds of those cars.