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Choosing a hosting solution that fits your needs is not always an easy one. There are so many different companies offering hosting services today, you really have to spend a considerable amount of time looking through the fine print to understand who is simply reselling another company's services. Small things about these relationships can put you in the middle of a "he said, she said" situation with nobody to take the blame when something goes wrong.

Make sure you are connected to the source

There are so many different hosting providers and resellers on the Internet today, it is hard to select the best one. One of the key ingredients to a solid hosting solution is the selection of the right data center to house your machine. A good example of this was during hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Even though the entire city was without power, water and basically in complete disarray, there was a single data center that never went offline, not for a single second. Anyone that did their homework and had their data stored in that data center, made a smart decision. Everyone else, did not.

Finding this data center before Katrina hit was actually not that hard. You need to take a look at the Internet itself and how it is connected across America. There are certain routes that contain large cable connections between "key" data centers in each of the major cities in America. The cables that connect these data centers are called "dark fiber". Anything considered dark fiber simply never goes offline. It is very deep in the ground and there are several different cables and varying routes in case something gets cut. These just never go down.

The trick to quality hosting is getting your machine as close to dark fiber as possible. Being directly in the same data center may not be possible or cost effective enough for you, but asking your provide how closely they are located to the nearest POP connection is a way to meter this. The further away from the POP, the more chance for something to happen and for your website or web system to go offline.

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