How to Pick An Excellent Web Host

These days, every web host out there claims to be the finest.

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

Firstly you need to break it down to what you need, which is either 3 types of hosting: Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, or Dedicated Hosting.

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

A Winning Web Host’s Control Panel:

This is the interface 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 as hard. Creating an email account to use will suddenly take an hour of research instead of 20 easy seconds and will suddenly need almost programmer level skill requirements without this easy interface. Your Control Panel makes doing any of this, easy for absolutely anyone. Only go with web hosts offering “cPanel” (or possibly even, “DirectAdmin”). If they don’t offer these, look elsewhere.

A Winning Web Host’s Support:

Everyone wants good web hosting support that will answer their questions quickly. But if you are paying $3 a month, you can’t expect support that’s going to be that exceptional. But some support should hopefully be available. Check if they have a contact 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 Big plus, and a very nifty thing to have available to you in case you need to contact them quickly.

A Winning Web Host’s Uptime and Reliability

If they are clearly not offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, look elsewhere. Downtime is agitating and costly for anyone advertising their sites. Visitors that come to your site when it’s down, will be very turned off to coming back. The only way to learn of of their reliability is to read reviews and other people’s opinions. However a fast way to test speed (but not quite accurate) 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.

A Winning Web Host’s Free Scripts

If the web host you want to run with is running cPanel, they will very often provide you with over 50+ free easy-to-install scripts through an addon known as “Fantastico”. This is amazingly useful, as it holds entire e-commerce shopping carts, CMS systems, forum scripts and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not necessary, but certainly comes in handy.

A Winning Web Host’s Per Month Pricing

Now if you are like most people. You want good value, and don’t want to use up your budget. Web Hosting has become a “commodity” item with plenty 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 confusingly cheap web hosts. End result, not worth the hassle of saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than popcorn web hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that’s over 4 times the amount of our $2 comparison. But this means the host can actually afford to give you top support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and actually run with speed.

Believe it or not, you TRULY 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. Website hosting is really something that will attack you in the behind if you go with the lowest-cost is best mentality and that’s the rock-hard.

Article Source: http://www.where-to-find.net

About James: James Collinsworth has been online late 1996, and has time-tested many different hosts and gives away Free Discount Hosting coupons for proven to be quality web hosts. Visit his website for more information: www.HostgatorReview.info