How to Pick An Excellent Web Hosting Provider

These days, every web host under the sun claims to be the best value and generally the cream of the crop.

But how do you HONESTLY know `which is the best web host?

Initially you need to break it down to what you need, which is either 3 families of hosting: Shared web hosting, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting or dedicated web hosting.

However, you are most likely after shared hosting, which is entry and medium level hosting for small to medium sites. VPS Hosting and Dedicated Hosting are both more expensive but can handle the resource demands on more popular websites.

An Excellent Web Host’s Control Panel:

This is the display that will let you tweak your site settings and even view your visitor statistics, such as which web site they came from, which country they are in and some other details. Without this, everything becomes 15 times more difficult. Creating an email account to use will suddenly take an hour of research instead of 20 easy seconds and will suddenly require almost programmer level skill requirements without this simple interface. Your Control Panel makes doing any of this, easy for absolutely anyone. Only go with web hosting companies offering “cPanel” (or possibly even, “DirectAdmin”). If they don’t offer these, don’t go forward with them.

An Excellent Web Host’s Support:

Anyone looking online for a host, wants decent web hosting support that will answer their questions fast. But if you are paying $2 a month, you can’t expect support that’s going to be that wonderful. But some support should be available. Check if they have a contact number to call (most won’t – which isn’t necessary a bad thing), but if they have a “Live Support” chat button, that’s a huge plus, and a very practical thing to have accessible to you in case you need to contact them quickly.

An Excellent Web Host’s Uptime and Reliability

If they aren’t offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, don’t go forward with them. Downtime is stressing and costly for anyone advertising their web sites. Visitors that come to your site when it’s down, will be very turned off to coming back. The simple way to know of their reliability is to read reviews and other people’s views. However a speedy way to test speed (but not quite accurate) is to see how fast the host’s own web page loads up for you, which can give you an hint of what kind of speed your site will be load with.

An Excellent Web Host’s Free Scripts

If the web host you want to run with is using cPanel, they will very often provide you with over 50+ free easy-to-install scripts through an attachment known as “Fantastico”. This is amazingly useful, as it includes entire e-commerce shopping carts, blogging software, forum scripts and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not absolutely required, but certainly comes in useful.

An Excellent Web Host’s Per Month Pricing

Now if you are like most people. You want good value, and don’t want to use up your bank. Web Hosting has become a “commodity” item with loads of competition. You can even find hosts offering hosting for a measly $2 a month. However, you can expect downtime and slowness and emotional distress with these cheaper-than-chips hosts. End result, not worth the hassle of saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than chips hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that’s over 4 times the amount of our 2 dollar comparison. But this means the host can actually afford to give you top support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and actually run with speed.

In truth, you will really pay far more with a super-cheap web host because of downtime, unusual slowness, lost visitors and lost revenue, poor support, and your own frustration when you check and see your website is down and your host is out of reach to help – or don’t offer any. Website hosting is truly something that will attack you in the behind if you go with the cheapest is best mentality and that is the truth.

By: James Collinsworth
Credit:www.superfeature.com