Introduction to selecting a webhost
Once you know what features your hosting account needs, and what your budget is, you need to select a hosting company to store your website files. There are thousands to select from, making it difficult to know who to choose. While we don't recommend any single company, our following guide will help you narrow down your choices to make the right selection.
Hosting companies are businesses much like any other; they offer services to their customers for a fee, compete with other businesses via pricing and services offered, and advertise their services in a way that appeals to potential customers. While there are thousands of hosting companies that you could select, it obviously isn't practical to evaluate that many to choose your hosting company. By narrowing down your choices to just a few, your decision becomes much easier.
One way you can do this is by using websites that compare hosting companies and their services, for example Hosting-review.com. Comparison sites rate hosting companies on a scale taking into consideration things like the companies customer support, guaranteed uptimes, pricing, etc., and often include customer reviews of the hosting companies. Generally, these comparisons have larger, well known hosting companies rated near the top, but smaller hosts may be included as well. One thing to note is that every company, no matter what industry they are in, will have had negative reviews at some point, so if a hosting company occasionally has the unhappy customer review, that is to be expected and shouldn't count a host out of your considerations automatically.
One of the first things you will look at is the companies pricing, and that they usually vary but stay pretty close to each other. When looking at pricing, it is very important to look at the details. For example, a hosting company may state on their main page that they offer hosting for "$3.95 a month", but that price may only apply to long-term (yearly to multi-year) hosting packages, not short-term hosting packages, for example month to month hosting. Make sure you understand the length of the package and it's actual price before selecting one, since many times short term packages are more costly. Many hosts are now offering maney back guarantees for new customers, ranging from 10 to 30 days, so that if you are not happy with their service you can terminate your account and recieve a refund. Keep in mind that if the hosts offers this, and they have registered a free domain for you when setting up your account, you will probably be billed for the domain registration fee if you cancel your account.
When setting up your first web site, customer support should be one of your priorities, as there is a good chance you will have questions or technical issues you will want clarified early on. Things like 24/7 phone support, email support within a short period of time, and support ticket systems should be high on the list of what you want in your web host. Along with this, good hosting companies will have a well written and thorough Knowledge Base and/or Ferequently Asked Questions area to help you quickly find answers and information you may be looking for.
The hosting company will often offer a variety of packages to choose from, with different prices and features, however many have started using a single package that should cover almost any website owners needs. It is probably safe to say that many of the features offered will not apply to your web site requirements, and you can pretty much overlook them, but there are many you need to consider, as pointed out in our hosting features section. You should know ahead of time what some of the requirement and features you need will be, and make sure that they offer a package that will fulfill your sites needs at a price that is within your budget. It is very common for beginning web sites to work just fine with the more basic, shared packages offered, and a good host will let you upgrade to another package in the future if needed.
Many hosts are also offering free advertising credits for new customers. This is essentially a system that offers you a way to advertise your website through paid placements in the search engines, like Google and MSN. Amounts may range from $25 to $75 for each search engine, and provide a way for you to start advertising right away at basically no cost to you, however you will need to set up accounts with the search engines to begin using their systems. Some also offer free search engine submissions, which means that your site will be submitted to seach engines so that you can start receiving traffic from user searches. SEO specialists often feel that this is not really needed, and we cover this more thoroughly in our seo section.
Depending on the subject of your website, many hosts may not allow you to set up your website with them, so you will need to check into their terms for what is acceptable and what isn't. This is usually applicable to adult websites, sites offering downloads or filesharing, hate or racial based websites, etc. Always be sure that your site won't violate their terms of use before setting up your account, and don't hesitate to contact them and find out if you aren't sure. Most hosts will have this clearly written out on their site, and will cover many other areas as well.
If your site is built with a dynamic language, such as PHP, ASP, Perl, etc., most hosts can support them, and some offer you a choice between *NIX and Windows based servers for your site. Different types of databases are also available, but if you aren't sure if your language and database types aren't available, don't hesitate to contact the company for clarification. Many hosts also let you modify special files like "htaccess" and "PHP.INI" files if needed, so if this is a requirement for your site, make sure this is available.
For the most part, most hosts that offer a large variety of features and packages should be acceptable for your needs. You may also want to consider if the hosting company specializes in certain types of website hosting, like ecommerce or multimedia, their geographic location, even thier size; some people may prefer working with larger hosting companies, while others may prefer a smaller company to work with. Once you evaluate different hosts, see which ones meet your needs, fit into your budget, and give you a sense of good support and quality services, you can pretty much select whichever hosting company you like. You can also contact friends and coworkers that have websites and ask them about thier hosts, and if they would recommend them.
Remember that, like finding other service-based businesses in other fields, it can be a matter of trial and error to find the right company to work with.