Choosing a Web Host

If you decide to have an Internet presence for your company, club, or organization few decisions will affect you more profoundly than your choice of web host. Hosting a website on the Internet is not a difficult task, but hosting one reliably and with the full range of needed services is.

One of the most daunting challenges when picking a host is the sheer number of companies that are out there to choose from. This alone makes many people "tune out" mentally and reduce their selection pool to hosts with a big name, or a big name look. One mistake many individuals make is tuning to some kind of online reference to help them narrow the candidates by popularity. This would be a great idea were it not for the fact that many sites that claim to rank the best web hosts seem to be nothing more than advertising by the hosts themselves. So how does one proceed?

The first step it to document your needs. How much space will you need? Most small business or personal websites require very little space and are well served by the most basic of plans. Do you need to have email addresses on your domain? If you so then you need to calculate how many because hosts vary quite widely on the number of address the assign to each plan. Will you require server side functionality such as .asp or .php? If your website has programmatic functionality then you will need to contact your web designer or programmer to determine what you need.

Once you have made a list of your needs it's time to narrow the pool. One big feature to look for is an uptime rating. Uptime documents the contiguous running time of a service. If their infrastructure has been unavailable then they were termed to be "down". At first, 'uptime' may seem to be a basic requirement for web hosts, but you'd be surprised at the number of hosts that fail even at this basic level.
A second and less technical method for evaluating your future host is to make a short list of providers and then send them a support request. Keep track of when you sent your message an and when they responded. This will give you an idea of how responsive they are to your requests. Make sure that you factor in the time zone that they are in. Also make sure that you already know the right response to your technical question so that you can evaluate not only the timeliness of their response but the value of it as well.

Selecting a host in not always easy, but with some of these points in mind you'll be well armed for the task.