A website hosting company is very much essential for establishing your website presence. It is not sufficient to just create a website; you need to have a domain which is provided by a website hosting company. As there are many such companies around, some thought and consideration has to be used in choosing the right website hosting company. A very important point to consider is the amount of support the company gives you. You have to choose a web host that gives a good response to any problem you have; and in other words, has a good support system with 24/7 live chat support.
Choose website hosting companies with 99% uptime
The website hosting company has to have a minimum of 99% uptime, especially if you have a commercial website where you have to stay online continuously, without interruptions. In addition to this, the web host should have lots of web or disc space as there is always the possibility of you needing to expand your website over time. Preferably, the website hosting company should offer you a web space of 1 GB so that you can add features and several scripts to your website if and when required. And if your web host permits you to hold multiple domains from an account, you definitely need more than 1 GB of disc space.
Some hosting companies actually give you unlimited hosting (Lunarpages and JustHost give 99% uptime - EasyCGI even guarantees 99.9% - referred to as "three nines" in the industry) - just try to find one that is cost-effective. Choose the web host that provides you with a Cpanel hosting interface as it are easy for the beginner webmaster to use. With Cpanel, you can setup email accounts, manage files and databases and provide website hosting tools. In addition to this, Cpanel may also provide a system called Fantastico where installation of guest books, blogs and Wordpress is made simple.
Check on the security features of the web host
If you own a business website that sells products or services, you need to choose a website hosting company that has e-commerce features like Agora shopping carts. Usually web hosts provide shopping carts for free. As scripts today usually use SSIs for inclusion of data, you have to ensure that you choose the web host that supports or activates SSI for your domain. It is important that the website hosting company is fast as slow web hosts only lead to the loss of visitors while waiting for the loading of web pages.
Choose web hosts with a minimum of a T1 connection for internet carriers; though T3 connections are faster or better. As security is an important feature of all websites, you have to choose a website hosting company that provides you with sufficient security. It should have important security services like firewalls for protection from hackers. Check on the bandwidth of the website hosting company as the higher is the bandwidth, the better it is for you. If you have lots of graphics on your website, you will need a lot of monthly bandwidth so choose the host with a minimum of 20GB bandwidth. This is an important point for choosing website hosting companies as once your website uses more than the allotted bandwidth in a month, you may end up either with a suspension of your site or a hefty fee for each GB that you use. However, be careful of website hosting companies offering unlimited bandwidth as these hosts usually have their policy terms printed in fine print.
Storage space
Of course you never want to run out of storage space, and for this many web hosting providers will give you large amounts of disk space. You want to read the fine print to make sure you won’t pay more if you go over your limit. Some providers will actually give you unlimited storage, just again read the fine print to make sure there’s no exceptions - Lunarpages is great for this, I’ve used their unlimited storage hosting for years and never had an issue.
