What to know when selecting hosting?

Selecting hosting can be a very confusing process, because it's so easy for a hosting company to not be what it seems. Did you know that anybody can purchase a hosting resellers account, on another hosting service, and set it up to appear that they have their own hosting company with their own servers?

Since this is true, it's very hard to know how many other customers, at how many reseller companies, are sharing the same hosting that you're sharing. You might be buying hosting shared by hundreds of other customers, and paying the same price you'd pay for much better hosting if you bought from the original hosting company.

This likely is very confusing - and it should be. That's why it's always best to make sure that your hosting company has a good reputation, and that you're dealing with the parent company and not a reseller. One way to find this out is to use Reverse DNS to determine who the owner of the IPs your hosting company is selling you are. If it's not the company you're dealing with, search for the parent company and try buying hosting directly from them.

Once you trust your hosting provider, you should make sure that they aren't overselling their shared hosting. Use our IP neighborhoods tool to check and see how many other domains are hosted on your domain. If there are too many, contact your hosting provider for an explanation, and ask them to move you to better hosting.