We've had some interesting experiences with our webhost which, by the way, is consistently listed as one of the top 20 webhosts around. The experiences I'm about to share with you are not all disaster stories... rather, they are learning curves.

So I'll start the story not "Once upon a time..." but the old classic "If we knew then what we know now..." we may have asked a few more questions.

Deciding to use a particular webhost weighs heavily on price, features, etc... but when you finally make the decision, unless someone you know specifically tells you about their experience, it may be a stab in the dark.

When we signed up with a rather large hosting service the first thing we noticed were the statistics, or rather, the lack of statistics. We fired off an email asking what the story was and received a reply with an explanation. The host knew what the problem was (which is always good) and expected it to be fixed soon. How soon? Next week.

Well, we didn't have stats for over 6 weeks and that is like trying to run a website with one arm tied behind your back and a blindfold on. You can only tell how many people are in your shop by how much money is in the till at the end of the day. Not very effective!

Lesson Number One:
When signing up for a webhost, always ask if all their services are currently up and operational.

Bigger may not always be better. Being swamped by customers is a good problem to have but when a company grows quickly, they may suffer growing pains.

Imagine your webhost has a problem that affects 10% of their 30,000 customers. Pretty quickly they will receive around 3,000 emails that all need an answer, NOW!

Lesson Number Two:
Don't necessarily pick your webhost by how many customers they have.

In amongst all this activity, an article I wrote was accepted by a major e-zine. Great! We were excited about the potential exposure to so many people and the traffic that may result. We quickly checked our website and to our absolute disbelief, it was completely down, zip, nada.

After a quick email we decided we couldn't wait any longer and called customer services. The problem had nothing to do with our webhost, every single website in the world with an address that started with certain digits was affected by a router in the USA.

Our site was down for 2 1/2 days.

Lesson Number Three:
No matter how good your webhost is, your website will still go down from time to time.

Before we even signed up with our webhost we sent them an email with a couple of questions. I think the email disappeared into the black hole of the internet as we never received a reply. We didn't think much of it at the time, there wasn't much resting on the reply.

We discovered the hard way that if they don't give much attention to you as a prospective client... this may be an indication of the amount of attention will you receive once you are a paying customer!

Lesson Number Four:
Before spending large sums of money on services or products over the internet, test their level of customer support.

The next couple of lessons are not from personal experience but are good lessons anyway.

What would you do if you knew your website was going to be down for the next 7 days? Depending on your loyalty to your particular webhost and the purpose of your website, you may want to change to a new webhost.

Something you may or may not know - to change webhosts, you need to send an email from the email that is on record as the *administrative contact*. Now, that could be a problem if you use an email based on the URL of the website you want to shift. If the website is down, your mail server may also be down.

Lesson Number Five:
Make sure the administrative contact for your website is independent to that website so you can change hosts if you need to.

Many webhosts offer to pay for the registration of your domain name. We have always registered our own domain names and recommend you do the same. Why?

Well, you lose control. Control over the registered contacts, control over ownership, control over hosting. Though most reputable webhosts will not register your desired domain name and conveniently lose it, maybe one or two will. They will have the records stating they registered the domain and paid for it... even if they did so on your behalf.

Lesson Number Six:
It's only $70. Register your desired domain name yourself and keep the control.

Choosing a webhost does not have to be a scary prospect. Just remember our lessons when signing up as it could make the process a little smoother.

Our Final Lesson:
A mistake is only a mistake if you don't learn anything from your experience.

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