Web site hosting providers

After you've chosen the best domain name for your website it's time to find a great web site hosting provider.

Basically, a hosting provider maintains web servers that provide storage space for  web sites. The competition is very fierce, making it easier to find great offers.

Main parameters to consider when looking for a hosting provider:

Bandwidth - the capacity of data that can be transferred between your site and the network in a fixed amount of time (usually a month).
The provider has a limited bandwidth to share between all his customers, that is why he must limit the bandwidth each customer gets. If you used up all of your bandwidth for the month your hosting provider might disable access to your site, or charge you for the extra bandwidth used.

Speed - how fast will your site load?
How fast can people download files from your site?
This parameter is very hard to check before you actually purchase the service.
The best you can do is to ask your hosting provider for a list of sites hosted on his servers and monitor their response for a few days. Most of the hosting providers today offer money-back for a period of time, or a trial period, so if you're unhappy with the response times you get change your provider.

Storage space - The amount of storage space available for your website's files.
Usually providers offer much more than you need, so unless your site has special requirements this should not be a factor in your decision.

Number of hosted domains - Recently many providers started to offer the possibility of hosting more than one domain with your hosting account.
If you have more than one site, or you wish to have several domains pointing to your site, this is a great benefit.

Uptime guarantee - the server hosting your site has to go through maintenance procedures from time to time. Also the provider might experience hardware failures from time to time. Uptime guarantee will assure you than the site will be online for a minimum of the time mentioned in the guarantee. If your hosting provider does not uphold the uptime guarantee he should issue you a credit for a month's hosting price. Today, most of the hosting providers guarantee 99% uptime. 100% is not possible.

Script and Database support - most of the sites today are more complex than just HTML files. In order to build a dynamic web site your site will use one of the scripting languages and will access some sort of a database. Some of the more widely used scripting languages are: PHP, ASP, ASP.NET and ROR. The most common database types used are: MySQL, MSSQL and ACCESS. The operating system running on the server usually will be Linux or Windows server. Most of the hosting providers provide only some of the available possibilities. It is very important to choose a server which supports the technology which your site will be based on.

Automatic script installation - if you are planning on installing a platform on which your site will be based, automatic script installation might get you started much easily. With a click of a button your platform will be set up and ready to use.
On Linux based servers this is very common and the feature is called Fantastico.

Now that you know the main parameters to examine, here are the most common hosting plans available:

Free - very limited resources. Usually ad based hosting in which your hosting provider will put ads on your pages generating revenue for him.

Shared - your site will be stored on a server that hosts many other sites.
This is the cheapest and most common solution for small to mid-sized web sites.
The hosting provider usually limits the amount of memory and CPU usage your website uses. We recommend always starting with a shared hosting plan and moving to a dedicated server as the website grows.
Pay great attention to the parameter explained earlier and make sure the plan meets all of your needs.

Dedicated - with a dedicated server you get a complete computer system dedicated for your site only. The server can be managed by you or by the hosting provider.
Dedicated hosting plans come with much more storage and bandwidth to use as a dedicated server solution is intended for corporate or other large scale sites.

Reseller - a reseller plan is a plan meant only for people who are trying to get into the web hosting business. As a reseller you get a control panel for managing your own hosting company, and tools that help you brand your business without letting people find out that you actually just a reseller and not a provider.
You can sell hosting plans which you create to your customers, and they will not know you are sitting on someone's else hardware. You are responsible for support and billing for your customers, and your hosting provider will take care of the technical problems concerning the servers. Many sites are hosted with resellers without their owners knowing about it. Usually resellers don't have such good support as a hosting provider (everything must be escalated to the provider) and overselling (see below) is very common when dealing with resellers.

Why pay extra for hosting?

You found the cheapest offer on the net for web hosting, why pay more? Well, hosting providers are not created equally. Even if the provider has the same plan details as other providers some are not very reliable.

It is very important to check the providers support before purchasing a plan. Contact the provider by phone, online chat and email in different times of the day and check the answers you get. How fast did it take support to respond? Did they answered you questions properly?
We recommend choosing a hosting provider which offers phone support 24x7.

As we mentioned before, the resources available to your hosting provider are limited. Some of them assume their customers will not use all of the resources offered by the plan purchased, and sell the same storage and bandwidth again and again. This technique is called overselling.
Overselling causes downtimes, the servers to run slower, and the connection speed is unstable. We recommend choosing a hosting provider which is in the business for more than a year, and always sign up only if there's a money back guarantee policy.