Hosting for a company website — what to check before you sign

Hosting is usually chosen once and stays for years, because moving is tedious. So it is worth half an hour before the decision instead of three days after a year.

Comparison tables on providers’ sites compare the things that are almost never the bottleneck: disk space and transfer. Below are eight that actually decide.

1. Will you get access beyond the panel

The admin panel is enough right up until something stops working. Then you need shell access — to check logs, run a command, move a database without pulling it through a browser.

Not having it means that at every harder problem you depend on the provider’s support and its response time.

2. Can you change the runtime version

And, more importantly, can you change it back. Upgrading a language version is sometimes necessary for security reasons and can break an older application. Being able to switch back in thirty seconds is the difference between a detail and an evening’s work.

3. What the backups look like — and what a restore looks like

Almost every provider “does backups”. The right questions are three:

• how often and how far back they are kept,
• can you restore yourself, or does it need a support ticket,
• what a restore costs — with some providers it is a paid service, which makes for an unpleasant surprise on a bad day.

Whatever the answers: keep your own copy outside that hosting. A copy held by the provider does not protect against the case where the provider is the problem — an account suspended over a payment mix-up takes the backups with it.

4. Is the IP address shared

On shared hosting your site and mail leave from the same address as several hundred other customers’ sites. It is enough for a neighbour to start sending spam for your messages to land in spam despite impeccable configuration.

If company mail is to go through the same hosting, ask about this explicitly. More often, though, the right conclusion is: mail separate from the website.

5. The certificate and its renewal

Whether it renews automatically. Whether it covers both the www and bare versions. What happens if renewal fails — will you get a notification, or hear it from a customer.

6. What is in the logs and for how long

Without access to server logs, diagnosing problems comes down to guessing. Check whether they are available at all, how long they are kept and whether they can be downloaded.

The same question returns after every incident — by which point it is too late to change the answer.

7. What moving elsewhere looks like

The least asked and most valuable question. Can you get a full data dump without the provider’s help. Is the domain registered in the same place, and what does transferring it involve.

If the answer is unpleasant, that is information about the provider, regardless of price.

8. Who owns the account

The most common trap, and it has nothing to do with technology: hosting and domain registered to the agency that built the site, or to a former employee’s personal address.

It looks harmless for years and becomes a problem exactly when something has to change without that person. Recovering a domain can be a procedure lasting weeks.

The account should be in the company’s name, the contact address should be a company one, and more than one person should read it.

Something worth separating in your head

The price of hosting is often smaller than the cost of one hour of work on a problem it causes. The gap between the cheapest and a sensible offer is usually a few tens of złoty a month — less than the single yearly incident that gap avoids.

That does not mean more expensive is always better. It means price is the least important of the eight things on this list, and the only one visible in the comparison table.