subject: Choosing a Web Hosting Company - 3 Factors to Keep in Mind [print this page] Choosing a Web Hosting Company - 3 Factors to Keep in Mind
Choosing a web hosting service is among the most important decisions you will have to make when building your website. The quality of your hosting company will decide the quality of experience your website's visitors will have. A bad hosting service can slow down your site, make it susceptible to crashes, bugs, and hacking. A quality host, on the other hand, will always be eager to solve your support problems, keep your site up all the time, and make maintaining your site a breeze.
So how does one go about picking a web host?
For most small businesses or personal sites that will hardly experience tons of traffic, spending hundreds of dollars on a quality dedicated web host such as Rackspace or Media Temple is just wastage of resources. You will hardly ever use the kind of computing firepower such hosts offer. Rather, you should purchase a shared hosting account at one of the larger web hosts such as Hostgator, DreamHost, JustHost, etc.
Customer support should be a vital factor in making your decision. Running a site can be a difficult task and you will run into a lot of technical difficulties over time. If your host takes days to answer your queries or correct a flaw, the experience of your site's visitors will definitely suffer. Ideally, your host shouldn't take longer than 6-8 hours on a normal business day to answer your queries.
Finally, you should look at add on services such as the ability to host multiple domains, cPanel (control Panel) services such as Fantastico, SEO, etc., and whether the host offers the latest versions of PHP, mySQL, etc. (these are programming languages that run a majority of the world's sites). Bandwidth, memory, etc. are things you don't really need to bother with too much unless you expect to receive thousands of visitors daily.
