Finding the best website host is essential for any business moving onto the web. To avoid problems and to ensure your site is always there and is fast to load you should use a well know, established provider with a good reputation for reliability and customer support.   Google are now taking loading speed into accountwhen generating their search results so, if you will be aiming for a good search engine ranking, top website hosting is even more important.

 

Forget about free hosting (and even cheap hosting), you will have to pay for the standard of service you will need. There are quite a few top website hosting providers which fit the bill (and many more that don’t) and by searching the web it is easy to find sites listing their top 10 hosting providers (or similar).   Unfortunately it is not quite as easy as that because these sites differ in their views as to the best website host and it is usually difficult to directly compare reviews.

 

Before looking at potential website hosting providers it is essential to have worked out what you want: 

 

Linux or Microsoft Hosting: This is something your site developers will advise on, if you are having a site built for you. If, for example, they build a site which requires a Microsoft hosting environment it is no good signing up for a Linux package. On the other hand, if you are building your own site you should go for a Linux package.

 

Shared, VPS or Dedicated Website Hosting:  Top website hosting providers offer a range of services offering more resources, bandwidth, disk space etc. and reduced competition with other users for these resources. At the outset a basic shared package will be all you need. Here multiple users have their websites and email on the same server and share the disk space, bandwidth etc..  

 

Speed and Reliability: A site that is not available is a sure way to lose customers and a site that loads slowly will result in frustration for your customers. Look for a guarantee of uptime of at least 99.9% and also search for recent user comments on potential hosting providers.  

 

Help and Support: This might be overlooked at the outset but it will become very important if problems arise. You should expect to see support provided 24/7 by email and phone.

 

Disk Space/Bandwidth: You will see that unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth is now commonly advertised.   This is really just a marketing gimmick as it is obvious that the disk capacity in the server is finite, as is the provider’s bandwidth, so the terms and conditions are likely to include some sort of limitation. Having said that, these resources will not be an issue for a new site in the short term unless it becomes very busy (or makes extensive use of video).  

 

Domains/Databases: The basic sharing packages of many hosting providers limits these. This is not a problem if you are only interested in having one site as you can always upgrade later if necessary.

 

Price: You might think it odd to put cost last but the price differences between the top website hosting providers are small enough to make the above factors more important is selecting your best website host.    You normally pay a number of months in advance (the more months the cheaper it is per month) but some providers will allow you to pay monthly.