How to Stumble on The Best Web Host for You

These days, every web host appears to, or claims to be the most unsurpassed.

But how do you REALLY know `which is the greatest web host

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

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

A Winning 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 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 skills without this simple interface. Your Control Panel makes doing any of this, easy for absolutely anyone. Only go with web hosts offering “cPanel” (or possibly even, “DirectAdmin”). If they don’t offer these, don’t go forward with them.

A Winning Web Host’s Support:

Everyone wants top web hosting support that will answer their questions fast. But if you are paying $2 per MONTH, you can’t expect support that’s going to be that of high quality. But some support should hopefully be available. Check if they have a contact number to call (most won’t – which isn’t often a bad thing), but if they have a “Live Support” chat button, that’s a bonus plus, and a very practical thing to have present to you in case you need to contact them quickly.

A Winning Web Host’s Reliability and Uptime

If they are simply not offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, don’t go forward with them. Downtime is frustrating and costly for anyone advertising their websites. Viewers that come to your site when it’s down, will be very turned off to coming back. The only way to know of their reliability is to read reviews and other people’s attitudes. However a fast way to test speed (but not quite reliable) is to see how fast the web host’s own web page loads up for you, which can give you an indication of what kind of speed your site can expect.

A Winning Web Host’s Free Scripts

If the web hosting company you want to choose is running cPanel, they will very often provide you with over 50+ free easy-to-install scripts through an attachment known as “Fantastico”. This is very useful, as it holds entire e-commerce shopping carts, CMS systems, forum scripts and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not absolutely required, but certainly comes in handy.

A Winning 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 plenty 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 confusingly cheap hosts. End result, not worth the hassle of saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than popcorn Internet web hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that’s over 5 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 also run quickly.

Believe it or not, 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 don’t offer any. Web hosting is truly something that will get you in the behind if you go with the lowest-cost is best mentality and that’s the truth.