Picking the wrong web host can be a pain. If something goes wrong, your site could go down. People who come to visit your site won’t see anything. If they’re lucky, they’ll see an error. And if you’re buying advertising, people who click on your ad won’t see your web page, but you’ll still pay for those ad clicks.

And if your site gets linked to by slashdot, a news site, or some other popular site, you could find your website flooded with visitors. And if your host doesn’t know how to deal with large spikes of traffic, you could find your account suddenly frozen or canceled. Surprise!

Fortunately, web hosting is a commodity. Where they differ is primarily in terms of customer support and style. In any case, you can hedge your bets so that if you don’t get satisfaction, you can switch to an alternative web host with a minimum of down-time.

The first thing you can do is to sign up for Hyperspin’s free website monitoring service. Their computers will do a quick check on your website every hour, and they’ll email you whenever it goes down. You’ll want to set up a GMail account to receive these emails, because if your hosting provider has gone down, you won’t be getting email through them.

The second thing you need to do is to make sure you have a backup of all the files on your website. And if you use a web application with a database, keep a regular backup of the database. If you have a falling out with your hosting provider, or if disaster strikes, you won’t be in a panic that you’ll lose your data, because you will have a copy of all of it. And you’ll be able to setup an alternative site quickly on a different host, because you can simply restore from those files and backed up data.

Thirdly, keep an eye on what resources you use. The big 3 resources you need to look out for are bandwidth (the amount of data your site sends over the Internet), CPU, and disk space. Some hosting providers advertise “unlimited” bandwidth, but there’s no such thing as unlimited. The only question is when someone puts one of your blog posts on Digg, and your site suddenly gets tens of thousands of visitors in a short amount of time, and it starts overloading your web host… How will your hosting provider respond? If you’re keeping an eye on what resources you use, and if you know what your hosting provider’s policies are, you’re much less likely to be surprised.

So switching hosts can be a pain, but it need not cause a crisis. You’ll still want to avoid that pain. To that end, here are 15 things to take into consideration when choosing a web host:

1. Do they run their own infrastructure? Or do they resell hosting from someone else? If you work with someone who resells hosting, find out who their supplier is. The people who actually run the computers, they’re the ones who ultimately control whether your website is available or whether it’s down.
2. Where are they physically located? And is there a real, live, English-speaking technician on-call 24/7? Or are you going to be dealing with a call center in some other country?
3. Is there a phone number you can call when things go wrong? If not, does that make you uncomfortable? A phone number does not mean they’ll actually respond to problems when the occur. Rather, it’s more a question of style. Does their style match your own?
4. Do they have an automated control panel, like cPanel? They should.
5. Can you run the web app software you want on their server? If you’re just going to serve simple HTML files, this is not an issue. But if you want to use a blog or CMS, you’ll want to make sure the hosting plan you choose actually supports this software. Not all hosting providers support all software, especially on the less expensive plans. On the other hand, some do.
6. Do they have a one-click install for the software you want to use? Just because they don’t have a one-click install doesn’t mean you can’t use your chosen software. But if they do have a one-click install, it can make setting up your website much easier.
7. What happens if your site accidentally uses too many resources? Will they cancel your account? Will they charge you for bandwidth overages? Will they work with you when their computer gets overloaded?
8. Can you easily measure the bandwidth you’ve used, the disk space you’ve used, and the CPU your sites use? If not, it will be harder to monitor these resources.
9. Can you use multiple domain names and sub-domains from a single hosting account? If so, how many? This is a very important feature, because it allows you to inexpensively set up promotional mini-sites, with no additional hosting charges. All you need is the domain names for your mini-sites. I talk more about mini-sites later in this chapter.
10. Can you set up multiple databases? Let’s say you want to put up two different sites, each with its own blog, for example. Both blogs can use the same database, but it’s easier to manage these if each blog can use its own database.
11. What is their tech-support policy? Do they publish the status of their computers and network? It’s much easier to trust a hosting provider the more information they provide about what’s happening, even when things go wrong— Especially when things go wrong.
12. How thorough is their documentation? Do they have any online documentation to describe how to use the features they provide?
13. Do they support any other specific features, such as embedded audio and video, that you want to use?
14. Do they have a money-back guarantee? They should have at least a 30-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.
15. Do they offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA), with an uptime guarantee… and teeth? Most SLA’s merely say you get credit for any time your site is down, but you won’t get anything for any business you lose while your site is down. On second thought, forget the SLA. Instead ask whether they have multiple, distributed, redundant servers… And expect to pay for a feature like this.