subject: Finding Good Web Hosting - What To Look For? [print this page] Wow, there are ton of hosting companies out on the market today. What makes it very hard is to determine which company is the best web hosting company, and which ones are just garbage. In fact, when you Google a certain company with review after it, chances are you just get a review from an affiliate that gets credit for you spending your money with them. I know this can be very frustrating.
It seems nothing on the internet is really unbiased and the hosting industry is saturated with affiliate marketers. Sure they can write unbiased, but does that make it really unbiased. But, you need to be careful when you read reviews online, because you need to sit back and think about what is their creditability. In the this article I will talk about what you need to look into for a web hosting service.
First, they have to be up for as close to 100% of the time as possible. Some companies will actually state that they are going to be up for 100%. This is simply a lie, because even the biggest companies have to reset there servers at some time. However a good company will be up 99.9% of the time. Google the service you are interested with the words "uptime."
What scripts do they support. Do they allow you to use the lasted PHP, Perl, CGI, ect scripts. It is very hard to create a webpage when they don't provide you with the tools you need to get the job done. Also, if you are going to add a blog to your site, you need to make sure they support Wordpress on their cPanel. Wordpress is the standard for blogging.
If you are going to run an eCommerce store you need to make sure they support eCommerce script. Believe it or not there are some companies that will charge more for eCommerce support on their site. In fact, some do not support it at all, or you have to be a scripting guru, which a lot of us are not. Drag and drop works for a lot of people.
Most importantly, they have to have good customer service. Bad customer service can kill a hosting company. In fact, you might want to contact them before hand and talk to them on the phone. Most importantly, you should also Google the company with the words "customer service" after them.
