How to Select a Hosting Company for a Videography Company

Well, first of all a disclaimer - I own a hosting company!

#1 thing - don't let your hosting company or ANYONE ELSE buy your domain name. Do that yourself and I recommend GoDaddy.com

#2 - before choosing hosting, choose the format of your website and how you want to build it. If you're thinking Windows, please think again. There are no good Windows hosting companies. I have a new, big client with a dozen websites. One is in Windows / ASPX and he ranks really well in the search engines, so he wants me to build the SERPS for his other sites before overhauling that one. So we checked all around and tried one Windows hosting company after another. After the third one in a month's time, the client asked me to just move it onto our servers, and "to hell with the rankings".

Instead, I reconfigured one of our servers to be able to treat aspx as php (I had to recode the pages though). That way, links to his .aspx pages would still be good, but he could be hosted on a Linux server.

You just wouldn't believe the problems we encountered on Windows servers and the incompetence of tech support.

If you insist on Windows, I would stay clear of IXhosting and HostNexus. If you ever need database restored from a .bak file, forget GoDaddy (and many others).
Other than that, you're on your own for Windows.

That leaves Linux & Unix. Both good, but you'll probably get better rates on a Linux server and they tend to be built for web servers where Unix is often a corporate platform.

The best hosting service out there? I've got two for you. One is a large company - HostGator.com The other is a small company - SmBizHosting.com aka ok-joomla-hosting.com

Both are on HostGator servers with cPanel and round-the-clock technicians. Both have good service, but with HostGator you may wait two to four hours. My clients get my cell phone and office phone so I am immediately available, during business hours and weekends. If you want support late at night or before 8 or 9 in the morning, go with the big outfit. If you want to sneak in the occasional question on mysql database; php coding or Joomla cms - go with the little outfit.

Now, if all you're doing is html - no server-side code, no databases, no ssl - strictly static html, then there are a lot of decent hosting places - Windows included. But you'll still have trouble with emails and site being down occasionally on probably 1/3rd of them.

The last time I had a support call over email (not counting new clients who need help setting up Outlook) was when a client got a new computer and had to setup Outlook all over again - three years ago!

The last time our sites were down - well, it was six years ago. Our clents' sites are spread over about a dozen different servers and during an upgrade, one of the new servers had a problem and eight sites were down for about three hours - between 1am and 4am. I wouldn't have known, but I have a Linux computer doing automated backups and testing sites 24/7.

You're being smart to choose carefully, because there is nothing more frustrating than being on a poorly-run hosting server.