The market for hosting, be it dedicated servers, virtual servers or shared servers (or even colocation), is often mired in half truths and misleading statements.

That’s a very controversial thing to come right out and say, but many web hosting companies offer specifications of services which, on the face of it, cost many times less for what appears to be the same specification as that offered by long-standing and trustworthy hosting companies like CWCS.

What sort of questions should you be asking of a hosting company that is bidding for your business ? Well, first of all, you’d want to know if the service they are providing is on their equipment or someone elses’, as their costs will be incredibly low if they are cramming you onto an old, loaded server with hundreds of their supplier’s other resellers’ customers, and your sites performance will probably be dire as a result.

Then you’ll want to know how many other customers they have on the hardware they’re proposing to offer you, for much the same reasons. You’d also want to know if they own their own data centre where they provide their hosting service or are they just renting some space off of someone else (who’s probably buying off someone else).

If you’re looking for dedicated server hosting, you would want to know what make of hardware they use, as the most reliable hardware will minimise any downtime you may experience.

For their network, you would want to know that they had control of it. A good starting point would be to ask them what their AS Number is – if the person you’re asking doesn’t know what one of those is, its probably best to move on, as its something you need to have in order not to be completely reliant on someone else’s network (which is clearly A Bad Thing).

You’d probably also want to check out their telephone support for yourself before you buy your hosted service too, and make sure the people you’ll be talking to can speak your language (wherever in the world you are).