Calm assurances from ISPs or hosting companies that they have a good system aren't enough. Remember that by and large, these businesses have their own interests at heart. Their business is selling you long term commitments to their service, not helping you become more successful.
Quite simply, a website designer can be replaced quickly and easily. More easily at least, than a website host. Websites are animals that live in little grey or black boxes on shelves at your ISP or hosting company.
With regular care and feeding, they can live long productive lives inside these boxes. Like many other animals, they love it when visitors come over. In fact, they thrive on it, because the more visitors they get, the more care and feeding they get from you, their owner.
If you already have a website, it must be pretty obvious that people don't visit just because its there. A website needs to be promoted very aggressively in the early stages (including both online and offline avenues), and then monitored, changed, and updated on a regular basis to maintain the flow of visitors when they do eventually arrive.
Eventually could mean a few days or weeks if you are paying for advertising or pay-per-click search engine positioning (.01-.50 cents per click depending on where you go), or up to 4-6 months if you are going with the increasingly unreliable free search engine listing route.
In either case, it is time and energy that will have to be spent again if you don't select the right web host from the beginning, and any momentum you have gained will be lost if you move your website. One of my clients once paid for six months of overlapping service on the first web host (on which was placed a simple redirect script with a reminder to update bookmarks) to avoid this problem.
So how do you evaluate a host before committing yourself? Use the following checklist:
1. Get a list of their clients and start asking for referrals. Some hosts will have a page on their website that leads to their client list, while others need to be asked. Make sure that you ask people who are using the same hosting package that you are planning to use (size of website, options such as CGI, multiple emails, et cetera). DON'T stop here. Most website owners frankly don't know if they are getting good service or not (which is okay if they have a designer to help them...) but talking to them will at least flush out obvious problems.
