What to look for in a website hosting company
Everyone who owns a website wants to find inexpensive and yet reliable website hosts. However, this proves to be not an easy task. Website hosts with lots of features and great support often prove to be very hard to find and/or very expensive. An unfortunate state of fact is that usually there's no way to verify the claims of the targeted website hosts. Here's a list of interesting questions: Is there such a thing as "inexpensive reliable website hosts"? Is there a real difference between website hosts? Are there any inexpensive website hosts providing what they promise? Is it hard to find them?
Now that we asked ourselves those questions, I'm happy to announce you that I do know the answers to those questions. And here they are in the right order: Yes! Yes! Yes! No; if you know how to look for them!
So all you need is a method to find them.
1. Finding inexpensive website hosts
2. Verifying that they indeed provide good service or -- to put it another way -- collect opinions from former and current customers
1. Finding inexpensive website hosts
This first problem is rather easy to solve. By using directories that list website hosts or even by using regular search engines, you can find many companies that provide inexpensive web hosting.
Write on a piece of paper exactly what you need from your ideal web hosts:
Support - should be fast and toll free. God knows what problems you will have, and you will need every bit of help you can get!
Availability - The servers should be up and running at least 99.5% of time. You don't want your visitors to find your website "closed".
Bandwidth - Although most websites don't need more than 1 GB of bandwidth, each situation is different. Carefully estimate how much bandwidth you need and select the website hosts that provide it.
Space - Usually offers start at well over 10 Mbytes of space. If you're just starting, then your site will have - most likely - under 1 Mbyte. Keep in mind that it might grow as you add more pages. Consider the fact that 1 page usually has under 50 Kbytes even if it's filled with information (more if lots of graphics are included). So, with a 1 Mbyte account you would be able to host about 20 pages. Is this enough for you? I don't know, but most websites don't need much more than that.
Scripts - Almost all the website hosts, including the "inexpensive" ones, offer Perl and PHP. Why settle for less?
Secure ordering - you might need this feature if you want to setup a store without using third party services. If your website isn't a store, you don't really need this feature.
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