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I am a web developer that is starting to look into hosting his own website. I would like to showcase my programming skills (PHP, MySQl, C#, Wordpress).

My knowledge of languages I am OK with but the actually hosting site is where my knowledge starts to get a little shaky. I know the basics (bandwidth, sub-domains, re-write rules) but I would love your input, to help me formulate a check list of certain web-hosting services that I should be on the look-out for.

Also I was wondering if there were any reliable hosting providers who give you the option to host both c# code-behinds and PHP code. As I would like to have two versions of my site, one in C# and one in PHP the hope is that if I need to look for another job this website will help me show possible employers my server side knowledge.

I hope this is enough info, I did some researching online but found a bunch of unless articles and I've always have had luck on the StackExchange sites. So hopefully you, can help me.

Thanks alot.

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One of the most important issues for me is support.

What I used to do before becoming a host myself was email or phone a companies tech support with a question and see how long it took to be answered. IF the sales telephone gets picked up straight away but support rings off... walk away.

If they were too slow they got crossed off the list.

Other things to look out for are

Do they offer a fully featured control panel ie CPanel.

Subdomains

private directories

mailing lists

can you easily have extra Perl or PHP modules added

Do they offer one click software installs like Softalicious.

Do they give you shell access for testing scripts

what about backups, do they provide them, are their costs for restores.

What is their SLA with regards to downtime.

What are their downtime stats.

What are their policies on overuse? Would they sting you or be fair about it

Do they offer email spam protection

Visitor logs/stats

Is there a DNS editor?

Custom 404 pages

Databases... how many what type

Do you have phpMyAdmin etc

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Thanks, this was exactly the kinda of checklist I was looking for. – Chris Mar 17 '11 at 20:47
No problem. Most hosts try to blind you with huge figures for disk space, emails and bandwidth which in reality you more than likely don't actually require. – Digital Essence Mar 18 '11 at 9:40
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protected by John Conde♦ Oct 5 '11 at 11:47

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