My sister just came home and she sits down on the floor of my room (I have no chairs – please don’t ask why I don’t keep any chairs in my room) while I’m on my bed and I’m just reading the news online and she starts going off about work. And how because they hired someone new, the website needs to get updated. She works in a small lab that’s affiliated with a local post secondary institution and in order to allow the school to keep tabs on them, they have to maintain a website needs to be updated with information regarding the employees. So, somewhere out there in the vast interwebs, there is information about my sister online, including her first and last name, a photograph and her education and her tasks in this lab. That being said, that’s kind of information that you can find in a lot of places, and from a lot of people.

But her boss (bosses? I’m not sure how many she has, really) is thinking of getting a new hosting provider and was asking the lab people if they knew any good companies. My sister doesn’t know too much about websites and web design, but she knows that I dabble enough in it that I could potentially suggest a few good providers. I mean, there’s just so many web hosting companies nowadays and it’s really hard to tell if the company that you’re looking at online is legit or not. There’s a lot of teenagers who put up little web hosting companies that are really just resellers and there’s people who’ll have really great deals who will disappear in a month or two. But doing the proper research for something that is really quite an investment since you are trusting that they’ll stick around, at least for the duration of time that you need them.

Luckily, there are websites online where you can check out the web hosting ratings on specific companies. These sites are very helpful as there’s often testimonials from real people who’ve used the services and there are real stories about people who loved (or hated) a certain company and they’ll say things like why or why not. There’s websites that have directories of web hosting companies that are great at shared hosting, resellers, dedicated servers and so much more. With so much terminology that gets thrown around the internet, it can be difficult for people who don’t know a lot about web design to know what hosting providers are really talking about.

As for my sister’s boss, I’ll be doing a little research for him and hopefully finding a company that will fit their meager budget.