With thousands of web hosting companies in the market it can be difficult, if not impossible, to know which really provide a good hosting solution at a reasonable price.

Ideally you want to find a company that will accommodate you as you grow. You can then start off on their basic service and add additional services as your needs increase. You will not want to change website hosting companies later unless you absolutely have to.
Even at the outset you want to avoid:
  • Server downtime
  • Slow page loading
  • Excessive restrictions on bandwidth and/or disk space
  • Low limits on email addresses and FTP uploads
  • Poor customer support.

So it is best to avoid the smaller, cheaper providers.

When selecting a web host you should look for:

Financial Stability:- How long has the company been in business? How many customers do they have? If you’re running very critical operations, you must avoid web hosting companies that may not be in business in a few months.

Infrastructure:- Does the company own the infrastructure or it is reselling someone else’s. Clearly the latter presents more of a risk. Does the company provide information on its network and the redundancy built-in. Is there a guarantee regarding network availability or network uptime?

Customer Support:- Your hosting provider should be there for you 24/7 and give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your problem. Do they specify a time for responding to problems? This is particularly important with providers that are not in your time zone.

Services Provided:- All good web hosting companies should enable you to set-up and run a website or blog easily without restrictions. Ideally this should include:

  • Unlimited bandwidthweb hosting companies
  • Unlimited disk space
  • Unlimited email addresses/FTP accounts
  • Uptime Guarantee
  • Cpanel for managing everything
  • Tools for creating websites, setting up blogs
  • Activity Reporting

Even then it is worth searching the web for comments on  web hosting companies and what you actually want to do. I have personally had problems with a WordPress blog using one well known hosting company and a search revealed that I was not alone. Had I realized this at the outset I would not have gone with that company.

The basic hosting services are all based on shared servers, where multiple users compete for resources. This can be a problem with web hosting companies which load too many accounts on to one server. Also of course each user can be affected by what others users do.

The step up from shared hosting is VPS hosting (Virtual Private Server). This is a way of putting multiple accounts on one server and splitting the server (cpu resources, memory, and hard drive space) so that all of these accounts act “like” their own server.  By using a virtual private server, hosting providers can provide small businesses with the performance, security, and control of dedicated hosting services at a much lower cost than that of a physical dedicated server.

Eventually you may grow to the point where the cost of a dedicated server hosting can be justified. Here you actually have a physical server (which you may get to select the specification of) for your sole use.

Whilst getting to the point of needing a dedicated server might be some way in the future, if you chose from  web hosting companies which are established stable organizations and provide a good basic service with an upgrade path, your life as a webmaster will be much easier.

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