Provider Investigation Checklist

There are LOTS of different options which will have different levels of importance depending on your goals, budget, etc. Below I offer a basic table you can use as a starting point for a checklist as you investigate different hosting providers.

OptionHost #1Host #2Host #3
Pricing
Setup Fee
Monthly Price
Upgrade / Updates (none, on request, proactive, etc.)
Operating System
Applications
Control Panel
Core Capabilities
Shared/Virtual/Dedicated
# IPs
Additional IP Cost
# of Domains
# Sub-Domains
Private Nameservers
Control Panel Technology
Hardware / Infrastructure
Unix/Linux/Windows
Disk Space
Additional Disk Space
Bandwidth
Additional Bandwidth Cost
Hardware
Min. RAM
Max. RAM
24×7 Support (phone/Web only)
Contract required / special terms
Access / Site Management Capabilities
# FTP Accounts
Anonymous FTP
Shell Access (SSH)
DNS / Bind
Email Related
# POP3 Accounts
IMAP Support
Web-based Email
SPF/SenderID Support
Spam Filter
Email Aliases
Catch All account
Auto responders
Mailing Lists
Mail forwarding
SMTP
Spam filtering
Development Tools
# MySQL DBs
Custom Error Pages
CGI (private)
PHP
Perl
Python
Cron Access
FrontPage Support
SSL (Shared)
SSL (Private)
Curl Support
Override .htaccess Support
Reporting Capabilities
Raw Log Files (extended)
Referrer Logs
Error Logs
AWStats
Analog Stats
Other web stats
Server Side Includes
Password Protect Directories
Backups (on-server or off-server)
Optional Program Support (version)
Fantastico Script Support
phpMyAdmin
phpBB
phpList

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