your website are housed in a building called a data center. This data center needs to be as secure as possible to protect your equipment -- your entire business is at stake. This means 24/7 365 monitoring by live, trained security personnel and security cameras. Certain precautions must be taken in order to keep the equipment functioning properly in case of emergency, like power outages, fire, and other natural disasters. This comes in the form of redundant backup power sources and fuel supplies to ensure uninterruptible power, state-of-the-art smoke and fire detection, alerting, and suppression technologies, and redundant environmental controls (ie. air conditioning systems).

Customer Service
Is it 24/7 365? Is it all free, or only certain services? Or is none of it free? Can you talk to a human being by toll-free telephone? In what areas? (A European toll-free number might not be accessible from the U.S., for example.) Does the web provider use email query tickets or live chat or both? How extensive are their user guides, tutorials, and help docs? Do they use Flash or streaming audio/video or are all of their help guides merely text based?

Testimonials
Who likes them? A smart sales site will feature customer testimonials on its very own page. To find out who dislikes a web provider, however, you’ll have to do a little broader internet research. Just keep in mind however, if you look for complaints, you’ll probably find them. A web provider is not immune from the old adage that you can’t please all the people all the time. So take complaints with a grain of salt, and read them carefully. Could the issue have been the customer’s fault, was it something that was out of the web provider’s hands altogether, or was it a misunderstanding of policy or technology or some other form of miscommunication? Far too often the only type of feedback a company will get is negative. If an individual is inspired to give positive feedback, it should be given due weight.

Guarantees
Just like you need to test drive a new car before you commit to buying it, you should be able to try out a web provider and their services before committing to having your site hosted by them. Rarely (though occasionally) will this come in the form of a free trial. More often than not, it’ll come in the form of a money-back guarantee. Fine with us. 30 days is the minimum. 90 is especially nice.

A good web provider will also usually offer some sort of uptime guarantee, meaning the percentage of the time your site is guaranteed to be live when a visitor tries to visit it. The best ones go from 99.95% to 99.9999%. As long as they have one in the 99% range, you can feel somewhat secure.

One last guarantee you’ll often see is a Custom Support Response Time guarantee (though it may not be worded quite that way). This tells you have quickly they vow to have a support representative respond (either by phone, live chat, or email) to a “support ticket” or “email query” you submit. 24 hours is acceptable, though you’ll see 48 and 72 sometimes as well. 3 hour response guarantees are rare, and precious.

Upgrade/Downgrade Policies
Are they free? For how long (1year, life)? What if you discover you’ve chosen the wrong plan for your needs, or you outgrow your existing plan, or you downsize? Don’t sign any contracts with any web provider that locks you into one particular plan with no recourse should these situations arise. There’s no need to have to pay exorbitant fees to get out of one plan and into another. Especially when a decent web provider will allow you to change plans whenever you need to and for whatever reason.
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