If you value your time spent on developing and promoting your website, if you want your online business to grow in a good neighborhood recognizable by Google, if you hate overselling as I do, if you would love a honest undersold host and a clean dedicated server, you should come to Jointly Hosted, the non-profit host dream for friendly and ethical people who deserve a powerful, clean server to host their endeavors.

1. Check for the number of server processors or CPUs
2. Check for the average load the server is experiencing

Get the 3 load average figures divided by the number of CPU they have on the server, add them up and further divide them by 3. With the final result:

• result <= 1 ( definitely an honest and great host)
• 1 < result <= 2 (good one, but questionable)
• 2 < result <= 5 (overselling, overselling, overselling, …)
• result > 5 (are you crazy?!)

uptime

Which will typically return a line of data similar to this:

21:39:33 up 10:45, 3 users, load average: 4.46, 3.92, 3.64

That says there are currently 3 users logged on and the load average of this server in the last minute, last 5 minutes and last 15 minutes are 4.46, 3.92 and 3.64. These figures represent the number of runnable processes at the same time on average for the CPUs (processor) to process. Combined with number of processors of the server, you may know how many processes are being processed by any single CPU.

Considering the fact that any CPU can only take on one process at any given time, there will possibly be processes waiting in the queue – meaning server is overloaded. Therefore, if the number of processors of your hosting server is 4, in the last minute, it is overloaded by ( 4.46 / 4 ) – 100% = 11.5%.

First make sure you have SSH access to your hosting server which majority of hosting businesses are now providing. Then create an SSH account and log it in to the server.

A rather simple linux bash command will help you determine how many CPUs your host has on your server:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l

This combination of pipeline command extracts server processors information from /proc/cpuinfo that contains CPU details each per line, returning a plain number which will usually be 1, 2, 4 or even more.

There you go. Now find out whether your host is cheating on you with this tip in addition to checking your server load!

Extra Tips

You can find plenty of other useful and interesting information about your hosting server and OS release at /proc. For example, for some RAM stats:

cat /proc/meminfo

For total seconds since the last reboot:

cat /proc/uptime

For Linux release and versions:

cat /proc/version

And much more. Just ‘ls /proc’ and try for yourself.

As a buyer, you want your money worth the deal. Here is a general list of things you should do at choosing a web hosting provider:

1. Is their sales site design good and unique?
   Not necessarily has to be beautiful and gorgeous but uniqueness and aesthetics integrity should account for the seriousness they take in their business. A bad design or a copied design would just hint their inability to start decently, let alone their competence in serving you well.
2. Is their sales site PageRank high enough? Does it have good amount of back links? Is it old enough?
   Senior sites are undoubtedly more trustworthy. And a senior site often bears high pagerank (check any site’s pagerank here) and a fair amount of backlinks (check for number of backlinks of a site by link:site.com in Google). You can also check for the age of a web hosting site by querying its whois infomation.
3. Do others / paying customers review for them or against them?
   There’s plenty of places where you can find reviews and ratings of hosting companies. One of the biggest unbiased community is Web Hosting Talk. Just go search the name of the provider for what others are saying about them.
   You can also search for ‘xxx hosting reviews’ in Google for ratings and reviews. But be warned that some of the reviewing sites are financially affiliated with the web hosting providers and therefore the reviews should be taken as rather biased ones.

There’s actually much more to consider when choosing a web hosting company. Remember that there’s no perfect hosting provider except what’s perfect for you and that there’s no web hosting without a single negative reviews. So instead of obsessively seeking the most reliable hosting service, comparing for the most cost-effective one would be a better idea.

Update: A good approach is to try to detect and find out what famous websites are using as host by tracing the IP address and where the domain is hosted.