ECS Website hosting services

ECS website hosting services

There are multitudes of website hosting companies, from large to small, located in the U.S. and overseas. It is often quite difficult to select a quality hosting company that offers reliable service and solid support. With some hosting companies you will find that if they have server problems, you are limited to support via email. Or that phone support is limited to daytime hours and that when you get through, you have to deal with the language barrier of support located in a foreign country. With other hosting companies you will find that they have a single internet backbone connection or they did not place your server on an interruptible power supply (UPS).

Elbel Consulting Services can work with you to evaluate potential website hosting companies that you have selected. ECS also offers quality, reliable website hosting on high-speed dedicated servers that most of our customers prefer to use.

Here is a list of questions that you should ask a potential website hosting company:

1. Are you a privately held or public company?
2. Are you a full hosting company or are you a hosting services reseller?
3. How long have you been in business?
4. Where is your company based?
5. Where is your data center based?
6. Is your data center secure from intrusion and natural disasters?
7. Do you have a backup data center?
8. Approximately how many servers do you have at your data center?
9. Will my account be on a virtual private server, shared hosting server, or on a dedicated server?
10. Approximately how many other websites will be sharing my server?
11. What is the uptime percentage for my proposed server?
12. What is the processor, memory, and disk configuration of my proposed server?
13. Do you have backup parts, servers and routers?
14. Do you have any single points of failure?
15. Will you backup my server? How frequently will full backups be performed? Incremental backups?
16. Will my server have multiple, redundant connections to the internet backbone?
17. What will be the internet connectivity speed of my server?
18. Is the entire data center on an uninterruptable power supply?
19. Will you control email spam on my server? Can the spam "threshold" be adjusted?
20. What operating system and control panel will my server use? What versions?
21. Is the server Unix/Apache based, or Microsoft based?
22. What versions of PHP, Perl and MySql will my server use?
23. Will I have to my own cgi-bin directory?
24. What statistical traffic reporting packages will I have access to?
25. What additional packages do you offer for my server?
26. Do you allow telnet/SSH access?
27. How many databases can I configure on the website?
28. Will I have 24 hour FTP access to my website?
29. How much disk space will be allocated for my website?
30. How much monthly bandwidth will be allocated for my website? What happens when I exceed the allocated bandwidth - will my website be locked out? What is the cost for exceeding bandwidth?
31. Will I have unlimited email POP accounts and unlimited email aliases?
32. How much will monthly hosting cost?
33. Do you provide web-based support? During what times and days? What is the average response time?
34. Do you provide email support? During what times and days? What is the average response time?
35. Do you provide phone-based support? During what times and days? What is the average response time?
36. Where is phone support located?
37. Is support provided by your facility, or is it outsourced? If so, where is support located - overseas?
38. What are the escalation procedures for unresolved trouble reports?
39. How large is your tech support staff? How knowledgeable?
40. Do you have hardware tech support available on-site 24x7?