How to Pick The Best Web Host

These days, every web host under the sun claims to be the finest.

But how do you HONESTLY know `which is the best web host?

At first, 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.

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

The Best Web Host’s Control Panel:

This is the online software 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 10 times harder. 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 easy interface. Your Control Panel makes doing any of this, easy for absolutely anyone. Only go with web hosting companies offering “cPanel” (or possibly even, “DirectAdmin”). If they don’t offer these, look somewhere else.

The Best Web Host’s Support:

Everyone wants decent web hosting support that will answer their questions with haste. But if you are paying $3 a 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 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 huge plus, and a very practical thing to have available to you in case you need to contact them quickly.

The Best Web Host’s Reliability and Uptime

If they are not offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, look somewhere else. Downtime is annoying and costly for anyone advertising their sites. Web visitors that come to your site when it’s down, will be very turned off to to returning. The better way to learn of of their reliability is to read reviews and other people’s outlooks. However a speedy way to test speed (but not quite consistent) is to see how fast the web host’s own web page loads up for you, which can give you an sign of what kind of speed your site can expect.

The Best Web Host’s Free Scripts

If the web hosting company you want to run with 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 contains entire e-commerce shopping carts, blogging software, forum scripts and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not necessary, but certainly comes in handy.

The Best Web Host’s Per Month Pricing

Now if you are like a good number of people. You want good value, and don’t want to use up your budget. Web Hosting has become a “commodity” item with loads of competition. You can even find web hosts offering hosting for a measly $2 a month. However, you can expect downtime and slowness and emotional distress with these cheaper-than-chips web hosts. End result, not worth saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than lollies Internet web hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that’s over 5 times the amount of our $2 competition. But this means the host can actually afford to give you good support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and also run fast.

In reality, you WILL 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 attack you in the behind if you go with the cheapest is best mentality and that is the truth.

Article Source: http://www.stf-webdesigns.com/articles

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

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