Thousands of people buy hosting accounts but little do they think about what features hosting account must have. It is understood that buyers have their own needs, but for most people some things are absolutely important. The reason why we are bringing this up here on this post is because we were in talks with a potential client recently and he was holding on to his previous hosting provider for his dear life.  When we checked into the hosting account, we noticed somethings that really amused us. So we thought we would cry wolf. Here is what we found:

• It isn’t fantastic without fantastico: This thing come up right on our  face; we couldn’t imagine someone buying a hosting account – knowingly or unknowingly – without “fantastico” in it. Fantastico is an application on your control panel that helps you to install certain applications like wordpress, forums or allow you to use a WYSIWYG editor to build your site. Without fantastico, you will have to do everything manually. We hate lighting fire by rubbing stones, lighters and matches are better, don’t you think?
• Customer  Service: Web hosting is a tough, thankless and a highly stressful industry to operate in – we can vouch for that with our lives. Still, it doesn’t mean that the rope should slack . Poor customer service is almost always severely punished no matter which industry or country  you operate in. We remember a colleague working with a competitor earlier who has horrifying tales to share about how accounts are inactive even after 60 days of payment. Sloppy customer service for any hosting company is a clear , shrieking death bell.
• Scalability, adaptability and the basics: Think about suites you wear for business meetings –  great  to wear when it fits you well but now that you had put on weight, it won’t. No business  hosting account should be like that; your hosting accounts should be completely scalable, adaptible and must have some of the most basic features or benefits people usually need. We won’t throw names here but we know of a competing company who has packages which are as rigid as stones – 100 MB disk space,  50 MB Bandwidth, 5 email accounts and 3 web pages designed( templates) for X INR. Don’t negotiate; don’t ask for anything to be changed.

Buying hosting accounts is just a matter of decision, but a decision taken without proper preparation could cost you dearly.