How Importan Is Hosting Quality To You?

[Webcrafter]

There are millions of hosting companies now on the Internet. Some are charging $1.99 a month for what they call unlimited hosting while others are more conventional and put a realistic price on their packages from $3 for a limited (size and throughput), $10 for unlimited and $49+ for reseller accounts. So how important is a server to you when thinking about your forum? Is it important enough to pay good money for, or is the lowest possible price what you look for in a server?

 

[kavin]

Its one of the most important aspects.
Consider a person clicks your signature link or a showcase topic link and visits your site. If the site takes a long time to load each page for him, no matter how nice your Forum is, he is not going to visit it back or wait for it to load.
And in another example, if your host is good in one day, and down on another, people would more likely avoid your site.

While choosing a host, you should look for a host that has good uptime, something established (hosts that runs with their own servers and aren't resellers), and something that isn't overselling.

 

[Jay]

What kind of question is this? It's obviously a very important aspect to forums because without quality hosting...your forum would be nothing. If you have crappy hosting, then that means you'd have constant downtime/slow speeds which may discourage some members to join/leave. Without it, life on the web would be impossible.

 

[Webcrafter]

What kind of question is this? It's obviously a very important aspect to forums because without quality hosting...your forum would be nothing. If you have crappy hosting, then that means you'd have constant downtime/slow speeds which may discourage some members to join/leave. Without it, life on the web would be impossible.

Hi there Dy.namik!,
As my wife likes to say "I know right" (she says it because it just sounds wrong to me). I asked the question not because I would ever choose a less than excellent host, but because I always see so many out there asking for free hosting, or for hosting that is ridiculously cheap. Like the $1.99 a month for unlimited web hosting packages. It is clear in my view these guys are severely over selling, that is the only way they can make a decent profit, not to mention the number of people that are most likely waking up one day to find their site offline because it began using to many system resources in accordance to a very strict usage policy.

I just thought for curiosity sake I would ask and get a general idea what people are thinking when it comes to how they view web hosting. The ones that opt for free or overly cheap hosting do so out of desperation, or out of ignorance (just don't know any better yet?)<br /><br />-- 28 Aug 2011, 12:55 --<br /><br />

Its one of the most important aspects.
Consider a person clicks your signature link or a showcase topic link and visits your site. If the site takes a long time to load each page for him, no matter how nice your Forum is, he is not going to visit it back or wait for it to load.
And in another example, if your host is good in one day, and down on another, people would more likely avoid your site.

While choosing a host, you should look for a host that has good uptime, something established (hosts that runs with their own servers and aren't resellers), and something that isn't overselling.

Good advice and definitely true, especially if your forum is still young, or small in comparison to the big boys, if you can't stay up consistently then the future outlook is beyond dim in my view.

When you say get a host that is established, do you ever use any tools to check a servers up time or just strictly go by the popularity or direct recommendation of others for your hosting choices?

 

[froggyboy604]

It is very important for my forums to have good hosting which load pages in 5 seconds or less on most connection types.

But, I can only afford shared hosting which cost 10 dollars or less right now because a VPS or dedicated server which is faster and more secure is out of my price range .

I probably have to settle for slower hosting if my Ad, and other earnings are not enough to pay for the monthly traffic costs of a very busy website, or I got banned from Advertising services like AdBrite.

 

[Aki-P]

Actually imo, it's THE most important.

 

[gamingrev]

Most important thing is the host
been with couple of hosts over the years and Liquidweb in the US has surpassed my local ones in the UK

support wise and getting things sorted

 

[roadley14]

On a scale of 1 to 10, i would say 11