A good host makes sure that it provides 100% availability, minimal latency, and high packet delivery levels to all it's clients. Generally if a client's web site becomes unavailable for a cumulative period of up to one hour in any one calendar month then they should provide you with some compensation.

There are some important things that you should note:

1. At what time intervals is the status of the servers checked by the monitoring software?
2. How often are the services of the servers checked? Usually most hosts set the monitoring software in such a way that it checks the status of the server approximately every 15 minutes. This is the industry standard

The services that are monitored by are (http, https, ping, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, FTP, TCP). Most third party software monitor and give you stats of the following services. You should ask the host if they have there own monitoring software or if they use a third party monitoring software. If they have in-house software then you can rest assured that this host is a reliable host. This means that this host has its own software development team and such a company can be considered as a reliable company.

This question is one of the most common. There are thousands of web-hosting providers out there in the market but not all of them are reliable and not all of them will stay in the hosting business for more than a year. Anyone can start a hosting company and it could be run from a basement too. Let me put it this way. First, ask the sales rep how long they have been in business and say they have been in business for 10 years. Then ask him how many customers the company has. If the answer is approximately, "100,000 customers" then I would suggest looking for another host. Why do I say this? Simply put, a good hosting entity should be getting not less than 150 customers a day so we are talking about 3500 customers a month i.e. 42,000 customers a year. So for a 10-year old company the customer base should not be less than 400,000 customers. So 100,000 customers is too few for a 10-year old company and that implies that the company is not growing. No revenues coming in to support the network and the end result would be disastrous for customers.

I will again give you a real-life example and I hope this will give you a clear picture of how many employees a good and reliable web host should have. A company that has been running for 2 years and having about 60,000 plus customers should not have less than 100 employees that are dedicated for Phones (sales, technical and billing) and live chat support (sales, technical and billing). They should also be available 24/7 365 days except US National holidays.

Your credit card numbers should be kept safe and secure. At most hosting companies the credit card number is very much visible to all its employees. This should not be the case. Only the last 4 digits of the number should be visible in case of verification of your account. Just make sure that the host that you choose does not give access to the credit card numbers to all of its employees except employees working in the billing department who are mostly doing refunds.

Do web hosting providers co locate or have there own data centers?
Don't just ask them if they own a data center. I am sure they will tell you yes we have our own data center. Just to be sure ask them the following things. How many servers do they have in the data center? Do they have UPS? Do they have a Generator? What type of connectivity do they use? What is the approximate floor area of the data center? Do they have a call center in the same building as the data center? Here is some calculation I got for you. Let say the sales rep says that the company has about 50,000 customers that means each server will host about 200 accounts or customers on it and that will give you an approx figure about servers or machines present in the data center, between 250 to 300. This way you can figure out the truth and you can get an answer to your question. I have noticed that quite a number of support agents at some of the top hosting companies do not have an idea about the data center.

There are 2 types of money back guarantees. The first is a 30-day money back. If you do not like the service and if you cancel your account within 30 days of signing up then the host will return the total amount that you have paid including the one time setup fee. Some hosts do not return the one time setup fee. You should confirm that. The second type of money back is the anytime money back. Say for some reason after 3 months of hosting you want your account cancelled and refunded then in this case the host should charge you only for the period of the use of the services and return the rest of the money back to you. Note in such cases the one setup fee if charged is not returned back to you. Also say when you first purchased the account the host waived the one time setup fee and if you were to cancel your account after a period of say 3 months the host will charge you the one time setup fee stating that the setup fee was waived on a condition that you host your account with them for period of contract saya year or 2. Most hosts do not clearly mention this on the website.

Every host provides a control panel. It is a good idea to go with a host that uses its own custom-made hosting control panel. Actually control panels are something like a front end. It should be easy to navigate. Remember the most important part is the performance of the servers that are the backend of these control panels. You need your site to be up and running always, not just a great looking control panel.

How many websites do web hosts have on one web server
More often than not the number varies from one machine to another, based on the types of websites each of them hosts, and on the type of the machine etc. If the websites on a server are more CPU intensive than the ones on another machine, it will be able to handle fewer websites.

Usually a sudden burst of traffic is a reason for joy, but if you happen to use more bandwidth than you were allocated, it can be a pricey business if the excess consumption bears a hefty price

Most hosts only have a monthly bandwidth limit. It is easier to estimate with relative precision how much bandwidth you might need in a month than to estimate the daily bandwidth consumption. That's why you must be careful about hosts putting a cap on your daily hosting bandwidth. Read carefully how things are handled in case of excess usage.