Are you technically competent at managing the firewalls, security, applications and programs on a dedicated server? Quite often, it’s best to pass those tasks on to the experts that live and breathe information technology. .

Ask as well who their carriers are and the saturation levels of each. BGP version 4 permits an aggregation of routes, including AS paths. Why is this important? If your provider only contracts with Cogent, Level 3 Communications, Verizon Business, Sprint or any number of other backbone carriers AND that connection goes down – YOU go down.

The Terms of Service (TOS) for most dedicated server providers state that clients are responsible for their own backups. Some do however some do offer a variety of paid backup solutions. Sadly, statistics for companies that lose their data show that all too often they’ll go out of business within a year. Whether the provider you ultimately contract with offers backup services or not, REMOTELY BACKUP YOUR DATA! It’s so much better to be proactive than reactive. As an additional note – routinely test your restore operations. Backups are useless unless you can also restore your data.

What we hear of all too often on web hosting forums is that level one techs are sometimes unable to resolve anything except for the most basic of issues and often have to pass the ticket on to a level two or three technician who may not be in until normal business hours, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. This becomes increasingly critical if you’re running a profitable e-commerce site or an intranet for a multi-million dollar company.

Across the board, most SLA’s don’t cover any losses you may incur in revenues. If your server went down for four hours, a credit on your account for a few cents or dollars won’t cover your losses, which leads to our next query.

We encourage our clients to submit tickets for any support-related issue to maintain proper records. This helps us track the details quickly. However, if there is something urgent, we would be happy to assist you on the phone.