How to Choose An Excellent Web Hosting Provider

By: James Collinsworth

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

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

To begin with, you need to break it down to what you need, which is either three families of hosting: Shared, VPS, or Dedicated web hosting.

However, you are most likely after shared hosting, which is entry and medium level hosting for small to medium sites. Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting and Dedicated server hosting are both more expensive but can handle the resource demands on more huge web site.

An A-Grade 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 20 times harder. Creating an email account to use will suddenly take an hour of research instead of 20 easy seconds and will suddenly need 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 hosts offering “cPanel” (or possibly even, “DirectAdmin”). If they don’t offer these, look somewhere else.

An A-Grade Web Host’s Support:

Everyone wants good web hosting support that will answer their questions with haste. But if you are paying $4 per month, you can’t expect support that’s going to be that great. 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 great plus, and a very nifty thing to have present to you in case you need to contact them fast.

An A-Grade Web Host’s Uptime and Reliability

If they are not offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, look somewhere else. 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 better way to know of their reliability is to read reviews and other people’s opinions. However a quick way to test speed (but not quite consistent) is to see how fast the host’s own web page loads up for you, which can give you an clue of what kind of speed your site will be load with.

An A-Grade Web Host’s Free Scripts

If the web host you want to go with is using cPanel, they will very often provide you with over 50+ free easily installable scripts through an attachment known as “Fantastico”. This is very useful, as it contains entire e-commerce shopping carts, CMS systems, forum scripts and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not necessary, but certainly comes in useful.

An A-Grade Web Host’s Per Month Pricing

Now if you are like most people. You want good value, and don’t want to use up a lot of money on web hosting. Web Hosting has become a “commodity” item with plenty 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 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 counterparts. But this means the host can afford to give you top support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and also run with speed.

In reality, you in fact 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 lowest-cost is best mentality and that is the solid truth.

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About the author: J Collinsworth has been online the mid 90’s (long time), and has time-tested many different hosts and gives away Free Discount Hosting coupons for proven to be quality web hosts. Visit his website for more information: www.HostgatorReview.info

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