How to Buy Unmanaged Hosting

Buying hosting is buying an invisible product. Furthermore, unmanaged hosting providers are hard to compare, unless you take a methodical approach. Here's a list of useful items you may consider.

Pricing - You Pay for what You Get

It's very costly to run a premium data center with highly skilled engineers specialized in different fields. Chances are, that paying more will reflect the level of services.

Uptime Guarantee

An uptime guarantee sounds very trustworthy at first glance. However, the compensation usually represents just a low percentage of your monthly fee, and you will need to make up a written request to get the compensation. Moreover, the uptime guarantee is usually suspended during service windows. Maybe, taking a good look at the historical and proven uptime will draw up a clearer picture of what to expect.

Power and Network Uptime

Any host will face down-time once in a while, but the nature of down-time and its frequency can, in most cases, tell the story of the providers infrastructure setup. Frequent emergency incidents points at unstable architecture and poor design. Frequent scheduled service windows points at lack of redundancy, lack of hardware investments and absence of talented staff.

Server Uptime

Any server will experience issues from time to time, and you are on your own unless the problem is hardware or network related. What's crucial is the time frame between the problem occurs until it's solved. If you have limited access to tools, and your provider offer few or no automated features, your server uptime can turn out to be poor.

Improved Server Uptime through Automation

Today, technology is available for any provider to offer automated features as an integrated part of your server package. Automation is the answer to improve server uptime dramatically. Remote reboot, hardware reset, access to the server even if it has crashed, open up a closed firewall, mounting disks and fixing file system errors and reinstalling operating systems are just examples of automated features you should expect in order to maximize your uptime.

Secure Support via Mail, Phone or Ticket System?

Even though you are running the most stable server with all kinds of automated features in the most robust network, at some point you will need to contact your provider for help. In the light of security the hosting provider's primary and most important duty is to validate if you are authorized to deal with the server. Why? Imagine, that an angry recently fired employee instructs your hosting provider to cancel your server immediately and delete all data. The more paranoid, security-wise, your hosting provider is, the safer is your data.

That's why you shouldn't look for mail and phone support. A ticket system, however, require a username and password in order to get access, and the more sophisticated ticket systems operate with different access levels such as invoices, power management, network etc. Moreover, a ticket system protected via a SSL certificate encrypts all communication, keeps a log on all user-entries, and holds a history of records for each server, which could come out useful.

Hardware Replacement Guarantees

It goes without saying that budget hardware fails more often than expensive hardware. Faulty hardware means down-time, and the time span you should wait for replacement can harm your business. Guarantees are offered by many providers who rarely provide transparency in how the guarantee itself is managed. If it's a 4 hour replacement guarantee, when will the guarantee enter into effect? At raising your initial ticket? When support staff has replied to your ticket? At the point where an engineer has taken a quick look at your server? When hour-long diagnostics has completed?

What's the benefit of a guarantee that cannot be defined and thereby executed? Maybe you would be better off taking your providers word that he will make any effort to get you up and running as soon as possible, replacing components by suspicion. In the end it may take less than 4 hours.

Privacy

Of course, no provider would hand out/sell/exchange your personal or company information to any third party. But in the hosting industry privacy is closely connected to security. Most hosting providers deliver your server with two users installed - one for you and one for the provider. The reason why is perfectly legitimate. The provider may need access to your server for support reasons, being "your hands and eyes", if he hasn't implemented sufficient automation routines. Maybe it should be considered important that the provider cannot log into your server without you knowing.

Contract Length and Prepayment

Purchasing an invisible product like hosting has a lot to do with trust and expectations. Most customers do their homework and end up being happy customers for years with the same hosting company. But even if you do your homework, there is no guarantee that your choice of provider eventually matches your needs. This will show in a few weeks time, and it's a shame if you have tied yourself into long-term contract. Go by the month and preserve your ability to move on a short notice.