Who is Our Hosting Provider?

To decide what hosting you need is much easier than to decide what hosting provider, the last thing is very difficult, I am afraid. There are a lot of offers on the market, all of them are so promising. Each assures you that they are the best, the biggest, cheapest, the most attentive to their clients and, of course, the most professional hosting provider. But for the start it would be right to understand who you deal with: whether it is a company or an individual. Both of them have their own advantages and disadvantages. Which ones? Let's see in detail.

Organizations

Organizations, first of all, mean validity and thoroughness: licence, legal body, office, account department, telephone number and many other signs of an organization. This also mean business investment and therefore more thorough approach to it. Initially it means that the basis of business itself is stabler and is predicted, though surprises can happen here as well. Predictability and understanding of a situation is one of the most important factors for the client.

After all, what is the essence of cheap services if your site have not worked for already 3 days?

In case of any misunderstanding they will give you back your money. You have where to complain on operations of this or that employee. All services will be accurately regulated by the contract-offer. But this is not the reason to think that everything is as pink as it seems. There is another side of the medal - the quantity of clients is so huge that for a hosting provider you can be just one client out of thousand. This is actually a typical problem for any business connected with service providing. If they lose one or ten clients, it will not change anything for them. For example, you noticed that a hosting provider makes some unpopular steps in the technical side, but your attitude is not supported by many other clients, you are risking to be not noticed at all, just ignored.

As a conclusion, we see that the advantages of the company are confidence and stability, then minuses are problems with an individual approach to the client. We can compare the situation with the public street bus: they guarantee to take you to the destination, but they will not offer you a cup of good strong coffee.

Private persons

Hosting from private persons perfectly approaches those who wish to just to experiment. It is cheap, there is no confidence that the hosting provider will still work tomorrow instead of going to the sea-shore and forgetting about you, reliability here is something abstract. Validity can be not mentioned at all. To start business as a hosting provider, as it seems, is simple enough - one just bought a server, put it on a platform and be ready to get much money between sessions, going-outs to night clubs and other discos.

Here is, as a rule, how these people sell you services with knowledge and moods like that. Though, people sell service, and sometimes even quite successfully. The advantages are possibility of working with you personally, flexible conditions on any technical parameters and fee. Or, in other words, again returning to transportation, hosting from a private person is the same as going on taxi with a drunk driver on the wheel. You will reach the destination or will break in 100 meters, nobody knows for sure.

As the intermediate conclusion I will mark that I can not state that it is necessary to go only to a hosting provider as the organization, but I will not recommend services from resellers or private persons either, there are too many sad examples. But thus there are a lot of positive examples when high quality of service was offered by private persons who then, in their turn, became organizations. Problems can happen with organizations easily. Even for real leaders of the market the number of the left clients frequently reaches half of coming. Clients leave for some certain reason.

Alesia Arefjeva is a web marketer, working with a Unix hosting provider.