Choosing The Best Web Hosting

Here are a few factors to consider in choosing the best Web Hosting provider for your web sites. The most important will surprise you. We are not going regurgitate (uh cogitate) factors of declining importance like bandwidth or disk space. And remember bigger is not always the best! Here’s why:

Most Important Factors in Selecting Web Hosting Providers

Control Panel – This is the page you will see over and over as you modify, monitor and otherwise operate your websites. It should be easy to access and use. Make sure you can look at screen prints of the hosting provider’s control panel before signing up to make sure you are comfortable with it. We like cPanel Control Panel’s ease of use and clean arrangement, but there are other alternatives.

Customer Support - Yes you want this. Some hosting service providers are better at customer support, and we believe good customer support is extremely important. Some of the fastest growing web hosting providers have gained reputations for good customer support and some of the declining providers have customer support complaints. How do you figure out which hosting provider has good customer support? Well keep checking back here and we will tell you in our reviews as we roll them out!! Oh, 24/7 support has become the industry standard.

Fantastico or an equivalent: Helps a lot with loading programs or scripts.

Other Factors

Disk Space - How much disk space do you need for your site. If you are not hosting videos, 5-10 GB normally is more than enough. Most web hosting providers we have surveyed provide way more than this now, so disk space is a factor of declining importance - unless you have a huge website. If you grow huge, paying a few extra bucks/month won’t be a problem!

Bandwidth / month - This is another factor of declining importance. Again, the bandwidth provided is skyrocketing. If anything, you may want to consider ultra-high offerings, like over 500GB/month, as a negative if you want shared hosting. This is because it is likely that offering such high bandwidth can diminish server performance on a shared server.

Uptime - A very important factor. However, there are no reliable statistics on server uptime. So look for your web hosting provider to at least guarantee the standard 99% uptime, but in reality that is meaningless since it is practically impossible to enforce.

CGI Bin - Another declining factor since it has become a standard offering. This allows you to run your own scripts and programs. So, if your hosting service does not offer this, make sure you know what you are doing.

FTP Access - Always go with a provider who provides unlimited access, another industry standard.