How to Choose a Webhosting Company?

If are going to start your own small business website you need to register a domain name and choose web hosting for your site. And one of the toughest decisions you will make for your web site is where it will be hosted. You will want to choose a provider that has a reliable service. If your site is down or takes too long to open up when visitors are trying to get in, it may lead them to click out of your site and move on to the next one with better response. And of course it’s not easy to transferring to a new web host when your old web host fail you.

So it’s really important to pick the right host in the beginning so you will not have to look for another web host after first month later. For this reason, it is probably best to stick with a well known company who you can check reliable references on.

Today, you can get a full-featured professional hosting service for anything between 5 and 14 $ per month. So a quality webhost doesn´t have to be expensive. But, the price differences depend not only on the amount of disk space and monthly bandwidth offered by the webhost but also on certain additional hosting features.

While choosing a webhosting company you have to consider various factors like Support, Service, Pricing, Server Uptime, Downtime and various other features they are providing.

First of all: Choose several hosting companies
Choose several hosting companies and compare their features, price, support, and stability.

Pricing plans
It’s not necessarily true that the most expensive hosts are the best. Just simply compare prices and services and you will find the right host for you.

Amount of web space
A web hosting service provider would usually assign you a certain amount of space on their server. So choose the right amount of space for your website. But don’t forget that you might want to expand your website tomorrow and you would require much more space in future.

Degree of reliability
A site that is not available (online), not updated on time or is down, will lose many online visitors and customers. If an online visitor finds your site down, he is sure to move on to the next link and you lose an important customer or visitor.   If your website is down, you will lose money and also reputation with your business.

Data transfer (Bandwidth):
Check if your new hosting company provides you with sufficient bandwidth for efficient data transfer. Don’t be fooled with „unmilited“ bandwidth. Unlimited bandwidth or data transfer do not exist and they cannot be truly delivered, even though they are offered. Ask your host how limited is you unlimited bandwidth.

Check their support
Does the web hosting service provide 24×7 supports? Can you depend on them? If you need 24-hour technical support, choose the right company.

And last but not least: Test quick response
Send them email with your question. Ask a simple question about their service, and see how fast they respond. They should provide an email address, feedback form or live chat. Compare the response with what they have ‘advertised’ on their website. See how they measure up.

And few small rules:

• After you’ve choosed a hosting company verify if it has support for PHP and MySQL. If you need PHP and MySQL.
• If you are planning to build multiple webistes please verify if you can setup multiple domains on a single account.
• If you are running your own business, I recommend you Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting or Dedicated Web Hosting. It’s better for you and for your customers. Find out more here.
• Is good to know that all hosting companies have support for web log analyzers (statistics), email severs, so this will be default, do not worry about that extra options.