If you are starting an online business it is essential that you sign up with a top web hosting service.

By using a well established and reliable provider you should have few problems and will be able to offer a good service to your customers through your website always being available and loading quickly. Google are now taking loading speed into account when generating their search results so if you will be aiming for a good search engine ranking, top web hosting is even more important.

Forget about free hosting, you will have to pay for top web hosting to get the standard of service you will need. There are quite a few top web 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 10 top web hosting providers (or similar).   However, this can still be confusing because there is no consistency about which providers are considered best and reviews usually empathize certain features of each package, making a detailed comparison difficult.

To get through this and choose the best top web hosting provider for you it is necessary to be clear about what you want:

Linux or Microsoft Hosting:- If you are having a site built for you the developers will advise you on the hosting requirements. If, for example, they build a site which requires a Microsoft hosting environment it is no good signing up for a Linux package. If you are building your own site it is usually best to go for a Linux package.

Shared, VPS, Dedicated Server:- 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. If you are starting a new site a basic shared package will be ok. This just means that multiple users are hosted on the same server and share all the resources. Top web hosting companies will not overload their shared servers so you will be fine to start with. Assuming you are expecting your site to grow and get busy a hosting provider which  offers an upgrade path will be best.

Reliability and Speed:- 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. A top web hosting company will provide a guarantee of uptime of at least 99.9%. To get an idea of their loading speed look at their own site and also search online for recent user comments.  

Help and Support:- This can be overlooked at the outset but it can be critical if you have a problem. A top website hosting company will offer 24/7 support preferably with a toll free phone number in addition to chat and email.

Disk Space/Bandwidth:- Most hosting providers now offer unlimited website hosting with unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth on the shared hosting packages. 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 will include some sort of limitation. Having said that these resources will not be an issue for a new site in the short term and may never be, unless it becomes very busy.

Domains/Databases:- The basic sharing packages of many hosting providers limit these. If you are only interested in creating a single website these packages will be fine – you can always upgrade later.

Price:- Whilst this is important it is last here because the price difference between the top web hosting providers is not enough to outweigh the other factors above. You normally pay a number of months in advance (the more months the cheaper it is per month) but top webhosting providers will allow you to pay monthly.

If you do not have time to research the above, our present recommendation is Hostgator as they offer linux and windows shared hosting, an upgrade path to VPS and Dedicated server hosting and have a good reputation (in particular for customer support).