Selecting a Web Host

One very important decision to be made is determining which hosting company to use. This is not an easy decision. Most companies charge by the year so if you make a poor selection your options are to either ride it out for a year or invest in another host. Having had bad experience with a host I understand how maddening it can be. One host who originally gave great service has degraded drastically so past performance is no guarantee of future performance but is the best indicators we have. Be sure to talk to customers currently hosting with companies you are considering. It is preferable that they have used the host for an extended period of time.

Characteristics of a good hosting service:

One that has a history of having a high percentage of up time
One that provides prompt accurate response to technical support questions
One that provides technical support 24/7
One that provides a control panel with meaningful statistics

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The cost of hosting varies drastically. Make sure the hosting service you select supplies the services you may need for your web. Some services you may need are: PHP, MySQL, ASP.NET, FrontPage server extension ... There are many inexpensive hosting plans available beware many will not meet your bandwidth requirements. One hosting requirement frequently overlooked is storage space for statistics for your site.

Some of the more inexpensive hosting companies do not provide a unique IP address for you web. This past year one company that had many many clients using a shared IP fell victim to one of their spamming clients which resulted in the hosting company and all of their clients being banned from Google. If you use such a host make sure you know if they will allow you to purchase a unique IP for the site, and the cost of adding a unique IP.

By all means Google a prospective host. When you find blogs and forums with negative threads on the prospective host beware.