Hey Guys,

Many people don’t know much about web hosting, so I thought I would give you my views on choosing a good hosting company for you. I will talk you through my experiences and what I have learnt. I have been with 4 different hosting companies and some have been really poor. In this article I am not going to name hosting companies, but I will tell you what to look out for:

Pricing

This is a very important one in most peoples eyes. You will find a lot of hosting companies with special offers, or discount now type signs, don’t be pulled in by them. I have learnt that cheap is not always better. As I said above I have been with 4 different hosts, two cheap and two expensive! I have got to say the expensive ones were a lot better and more reliably.

Try and look for a monthly option, what I have learnt in the past is that try a hosting company for one month, and if you like them pay for 1 year (usually cheaper). By only paying for a month will allow you to test there features and support etc…I bought a contract with a hosting company for two years (huge mistake!).

Customer Service

You might not think this is very important, but so many times I have needed support from the hosting company, whether its by phone or by email. When you are first looking for a host, you might want to email a few different hosting companies, asking questions and see how fast they reply, this is always a good way. Also another good way is to Google their name and see if there are any reviews about the hosting company your going to choose.

What they offer

This is going to be slightly longer to discuss, but what they offer is really important. You have to think what kind of you will need hosting, will it be a big website? Do you need a lot of storage space? Will it be a really popular website (I know we all have dreams, but realistically). What other options do you want? You can get the choice between different email accounts, MySQL Databases (needed for most CMS, e.g. drupal and wordpress) etc… These are all things to take into account.

You might want to look for features like free blog installations, so you don’t have to worry about install Wordpress, the hosting company will do it for you. Bigger is not better, especially if you are a small business or wont get a lot of traffic, as people sometimes pay a lot of money for things they do not use.

Country

The sub-heading might confuse you, but you might want to make sure its local, I mean if you live in Scotland, get a United Kingdom hosting company (this might not always be the case), but if you need to contact them by phone, you don’t want to be paying a crazy amount for a 5 minute converstation to someone in USA. I went with a USA Hosting Company, but thats only because they were recommended by a lot of people I talk to, plus international calls don’t really scare me…

Research

I briefly said above that you should research their name, find reviews etc. This is the best way to see if a hosting company is rubbish. Say I wanted to find reviews about a company called WizzHack Hosting, I would type into Google; WizzHack Hosting Reviews, and if WizzHack Hosting was an actual hosting company, you would find reviews, remember dont only go on what reviews say, as they could be competitors writing a rubbish review…

Overall

Becareful on who you choose, make sure you know your stuff before buying a hosting company , find out the size of stuff you want to upload and other basic things such as would you like email for your domain? Would like a sub-domain (i.e. subdomain.yourwebsite.com). In my past experiences, cheap is certainly not better!

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, leave a comment.

Thanks,

WizzKid