How to Pick The Best Web Host for You

These days, every web host there is, claims to be the greatest.

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

To begin with, 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.

But you are most likely after shared hosting, which is entry and medium level hosting for small to medium sites. VPS Hosting and dedicated web hosting are both more pricey but can handle the resource demands on more popular sites.

An Excellent Web Host’s Control Panel:

This is the interface 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 5 times harder. 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 smart 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, move on.

An Excellent Web Host’s Support:

Every person wants decent web hosting support that will answer their questions fast. But if you are paying $4 a month, you can’t expect support that’s going to be that great. But some support should be available. Check if they have a phone number to call (most won’t – which isn’t that much of a bad thing), but if they have a “Live Support” chat button, that’s a great plus, and a very practical thing to have available to you in case you need to contact them with speed due to any problems.

An Excellent Web Host’s Uptime and Reliability

If they aren’t offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, move on. Downtime is aggravating and costly for anyone advertising their websites. Web visitors that come to your site when it’s down, will be very turned off to ever coming back. The better way to know of their reliability is to read reviews and other people’s opinions. However a speedy way to test speed (but not quite dependable) is to see how fast the web host’s own web page loads up for you, which can give you an sign of what kind of speed your site can expect.

An Excellent Web Host’s Free Scripts

If the web host you want to consider, is running cPanel, they will very often provide you with over 50+ free easy-to-install scripts through an addon known as “Fantastico”. This is amazingly useful, as it holds 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 handy.

An Excellent Web Host’s Per Month Pricing

Now if you are like a good number of people. You want good value, and don’t want to use up your budget. Web Hosting has become a “commodity” item with loads of competition. You can even find web hosts offering hosting for a measly $3 a month. However, you can expect downtime and slowness and emotional distress with these cheaper-than-a-soft-drink web hosts. End result, not worth saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than chips web hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that’s over 4 times the fee of our 2 dollar counterparts. But this means the host can afford to give you good support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and actually run fast.

In truth, you TRULY 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 are very slow to respond. Web hosting is truly something that will get you in the behind if you go with the cheapest is best mentality and that is the solid truth.

Article Source: http://www.myaddirectory.com

About The Hosting Guru: J Collinsworth has been online late 1996, and has time-tested many different hosts and gives away Discount Hosting coupons for proven to be quality web hosts. Visit his website for more information: www.HostgatorReview.info

If You want to use this article on your website then select COPY THIS ARTICLE in the Menu on the right side!

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated