Is your website for a business, or personal in nature?
Are you expecting a lot of traffic, or will it be something that grows slowly?
Will your website be multimedia heavy, or simply a few pages of text with minimal images?
A few criteria to keep in mind when you're looking for your host:
Once you've answered the above questions, you'll be in good shape to look further into what you need in a top web hosting provider. Here are just a few areas you'll want to pay very close attention to:
Amount of space provided: Firstly, you need to be aware of how much space your web company will provide for your website. If you're planning on a simple site, then the smallest amount is probably fine. For a larger site that utilizes video, large images, or complex coding, you'll need far more space.
Amount of bandwidth provided: While the above refers to the amount of space your site will take, in many ways bandwidth is a more important consideration. This is how much information can be transferred to people viewing your site. Again, if your website is simple, and you don't expect too many people to visit, then you can get by with smaller bandwidth. However, each time a video is viewed on your website that download will count against your bandwidth, so if you're planning on a multimedia rich site, you need to make sure you have the bandwidth to support it.
Advertising: Most paid web hosts will not put advertising on your web pages, however many free accounts do. If you're simply hosting a personal site, advertising may not be a large issue for you, however for business sites you'll likely want to make sure that there is no advertising of any kind.
Reliability: You'll want your web host to have 99.5% uptime at the very minimum. Though this is less important with a personal site, remember that every time your business site is down you could be losing money! Get web provider uptime guarantees in writing, and check in with them every few months to make sure they're living up to their promises.
With this simple criteria, you can make sure you have the best web hosting service around for a price that fits your budget.
