Do you Know What your Hosting SLA is?

Written by: Lars Jensen


How is the Bandwidth and Disk Space Quota Handled?

If you go over your quota, how is it handled. Are you automatically charged the extra fee? And if so, how much? Or, is your account suspended until you pay the extra charges or pay for the next hosting account? Or, are you notified about the "problem" and asked to pay the extra charges or upgrade to the next hosting plan within a certain number of days?

Domain Names.

If you have registered a domain name with a registrar you should not encounter any problems. If you are registering a domain name through your web host provider, make sure you retain all rights to the domain name. This is especially true if you are given a free or a very inexpensive domain name with your account. Some web host providers will register the domain name for you, but in their name, which means you do not own it. In some cases, if you wish to move to another web host provider you will have to purchase the domain from them at a much higher cost.

Miscellaneous Categories

A few other categories to study are server resources, background running programs, mass mailing and other technical areas like Cron Jobs, telnet or SSH etc. Some of these topics mentioned in the SLA may sound rather strict or stringent but it is actually very common to read these same restrictions on almost all web host providers. This is, as mentioned earlier, to inform you of your rights and most importantly in this case, to protect the customer from harming or congesting the server for the company's other clients. You do not want someone slowing down the server which you are using so your web pages load slowly or not at all. So you can actually be more reassured that if this happens, action will be taken, thus an advantage to you and not necessarily a hindrance. (This mainly refers to all virtual hosting accounts.)

If you are uncertain about a certain part of an SLA, you should always ask the web host provider. Never assume something is adequate unless you are sure and have checked. Always think ahead. Will I need this or that in the future? What happens if my website grows much bigger? What if I need to upload x type of files from now on? What if the third party company or software I work with needs this or that enabled? Should I have read the whole SLA? Never assume your web host provider will have or offer what you wish. Find out, and if you are not sure, ask!

This article is contributed by Lars Jensen of Hosting and Designs (http://www.hostinganddesigns.com).



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