You’ll need to do some research on web hosting companies first. While most companies offer generous bandwidth, disk space, and email accounts, variables such as cost and availability of technical support increase in importance. Here are some ways to begin your search for the perfect web host.

First, determine what you need. You probably wouldn’t walk into a shoe store and say, “I need shoes.” You’d give some specifics, like your shoe size, what type of shoes you want, how much you’re willing to pay. The situation with buying website hosting is similar. Are you a one-person shop, or do you have a dozen employees? Will you be selling things on your site, or is it purely informational? Will visitors to your site download large files? How many visitors do you expect or hope to have on a given day?

There’s nothing wrong with asking someone you know who runs a website how they went about it. In fact, it’s an opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes. But there are also plenty of resources online. The home pages of web hosting providers should give you some ideas, and there are user forums where you can read and learn some real world experiences with various hosting companies. If you are able to join these forums, it’s OK to ask questions, such as, “I see you chose Company X for your web host. Do you think they would work well for my site? My site will offer downloads of video training materials, and I’ll need quite a bit of bandwidth.” The user forums are where people tend to tell it like it is.

Speaking of bandwidth, while that and disk space are important considerations, you should know that most hosting providers will offer sufficient resources unless you will have a bandwidth hogging application, or a 10,000 visitors per day. It is important, however, to make sure that you will be able to upgrade your service if your business outgrows its original website. The answer is almost always “yes,” but it’s a good idea to make sure.

If you plan to have extra features, like extensive photo storage, database support, or other add-ons, ask up front if your hosting package will accommodate these things.

One thing that you should never consider as an “extra” is live tech support by email, live chat, and phone. Web hosting companies are coming around to the fact that there are no “regular business hours” for online businesses, and that their clients want to talk to an actual human regardless of time or day. Again, don’t take it for granted; make sure upfront that you’re getting true 24/7/365 support services.
Many clients enjoy having a web based control panel. This will allow you to add or modify email accounts, tweak your site’s configuration, and do basic file editing. These control panels often are graphical user interfaces that make it easy for you to make changes to your site without having to know HTML.

Round the clock FTP (file transfer protocol) access is another very handy thing to have. This will allow you to make changes to your site no matter what time it is. Web based email is another near necessity in today’s business environment. This will allow you and your employees to check their email anywhere – not just from their own computer.

Beyond these basics, here are some other questions to answer before signing on with a hosting company.

Will you share a server or will your site have one dedicated to it alone? For most businesses, shared hosting works fine. But larger businesses may need to flexibility and control that comes with having an entire server devoted to their website. Fortunately, shared hosting can now be quite generous with disk space and bandwidth, and security measures between websites hosted on the same server minimize the chances of technical problems. And shared hosting costs much less than dedicated hosting.

Does your hosting provider have e-commerce capabilities? Many come with ready-to-use shopping cart programs and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protection for online credit card transactions. These features allow you to configure your retail site quickly and with minimal costs.

Some hosting companies provide other goodies, like blog software, content management, and picture galleries. Fantastico is the name of a package of software that contains over 40 free programs that are easy to install from your site’s control panel.

While price is still important in determining which webhost you choose, tech support and a good reputation are more important factors. You need to get your site up and running, and you need to be able to grow on the web as your business takes off.

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You can think of web hosting as being divided into two types: virtual web hosting and dedicated web hosting. Virtual web hosting is often favored by small businesses because of its cost effectiveness. With virtual web hosting, you rent space alongside many other businesses on a server. While it sounds as if all the businesses are jumbled up on one piece of hardware, what is actually the case is that each client in a virtual web hosting environment has its own server resources blocked off from everybody else’s, including processor, memory, and disk space. This works well for businesses that don’t need a lot of disk space or bandwidth to operate their web site. It is also a great choice for clients who want to manage a number of separate web sites at a low cost.

The reason that this type of web hosting is so cost effective is that despite their unique functions, the web hosting requirements are very similar among small businesses. Hosting vendors who can offer nearly identical services to a large number of customers efficiently are able to multiply small profits by large numbers of customers.

Dedicated hosting is an option that midsize and large businesses may consider if they need the control and flexibility of having a server (or servers) dedicated to their website. This type of web hosting is expensive, but allows greater control over security, support, and maintenance. Web hosting vendors who offer dedicated hosting have redundant resources in their data center that can nearly eliminate downtime.

Dedicated hosting often means that your business can write and run custom scripts and applications, or just manage the web site and leave the upkeep of the network and hardware to the hosting company. You can buy a server and host the site yourself, but this is an expensive option and means you have to either know how to manage the hardware, software, and connectivity or you have to hire someone who does. Some businesses already have a dedicated IT staff and data center, and if this is the case, then it probably makes sense to buy and operate another server.

However, for companies without their own IT department and budget, renting a dedicated server from a hosting provider is the most cost effective option. There are many web hosting vendors who offer dedicated server packages. Once you know how much of a hands-on approach you’re willing to take, you can examine the offerings of several hosting vendors and see if their operations complement yours. Some vendors provide tools for creating and managing your site by providing a web based control panel that you can use to tweak your site. Some vendors let you use your own HTML authoring program and upload pages as you make them.

Web hosting vendors know they have to compete for your business, and most try to make your choice easy by offering services that are popular and packaging them together into specific web hosting plans. Most of the plans out there have you pay an upfront set-up fee, and then a monthly fee for your plan and any additional a la carte options (like extra storage or extra email accounts) you purchase.
There are so many web hosting vendors around that it can be overwhelming for a business to choose who they want to host their website. If you know your requirements, or can broadly estimate them, you can almost certainly find a web hosting vendor with a hosting package that is right for you and allows for your site to grow along with your business.

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There are several web hosting directories, but as one example, http://www.webhostdir.com/ works like this. At the very top of the home page are two tabs, one for “Web Hosting” and the other for “Dedicated Server.” If you don’t yet know whether your businesses website will require a dedicated server, chances are good that it will not. Most business websites are small enough that shared web hosting offers adequate services for their website needs.

Underneath those two tabs is another row of tabs: Home, Web Host Search, Request a Quote, Web Hosting News, Guides, Hosting Forums, and Web Host Awards. The hosting forums are where you’ll find a lot of firsthand knowledge about what works and what doesn’t in web hosting. This is where the clients get together to discuss their web hosting experiences and to ask questions. You can sign up to participate in the hosting forums, but before you start posting, you should go through the FAQ section to see what answers are already available, and to learn the dos and don’ts of participating.

After looking through a hosting directory, and maybe participating in forums, you may have a good idea which hosting company you want to use. The directory will give you contact information for web hosts, and this is valuable information in your search. You should be able to go to your short list of web hosts with your requirements for disk space, bandwidth, and amount of traffic you need it to handle, and from their responses you’ll be able to gauge a bit about the web hosting culture at different hosting vendors as well as their eagerness to answer your questions and help you find the right hosting package.

In addition to presenting your needs in a web host, you should also ask hosting providers about basic things like how long they’ve been in business, and what methods of customer support they employ. Between these factors, your needs, your budget, and what you’ve learned from hosting forums, you should be able to make a wise choice in hosting providers. A web hosting directory can be your key to sifting through the many companies out there to find the one that suits your needs best.

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More recently, shared hosting has evolved into what is called “virtual dedicated hosting.” This treats every sector of the server as if it was an entire, standalone piece of hardware, so that if one site crashes, the others are unaffected.

For those sites that do need an entire server, dedicated hosting is available. This means that an entire server is devoted to one website and all its sub domains. If you are just starting out with your website, even if you plan to have e-commerce features, shared hosting, or virtual dedicated hosting will probably be your best bet, mainly because true dedicated hosting is more expensive. The average web site does just fine with 1 to 3 GB disk space, which is well within the capabilities of shared hosting setups.

The main reason a site might need more is because it offers downloading services of audio or video, or if a site regularly receives over 5,000 visitors per day. Those situations require plenty of disk space and bandwidth. Otherwise, a typical shared hosting package will almost certainly be sufficient and cost effective for you.

You need to know what type of server operating system will work with your site. Don’t panic. You don’t need to know how to program the servers. There are people who do that for you. What you need to know is what kinds of software you will be using, and if that software has to be run on Windows or on Linux, or if it will work on either. The operating system you use for your own personal computer has little to do with whether your site will require Linux or Windows hosting. All you have to be able to do is use your web publishing software.

Linux is widely considered to be the best operating system for web servers. It is reliable, efficient, and stable. If your website is hosted on a Linux system, it will likely have very high uptime, which is crucial for any e-commerce sites.

If you plan to use Microsoft proprietary software such as FrontPage, Windows Streaming Media, or MSSQL, then you will probably require a Windows based host. Most anything else will work with either Windows or Linux platforms. Unless you will be using features that require either Linux or Windows servers, you can most likely worry about other things, like making sure you find a good hosting service with the technical support you need.

Most hosting packages come with email addresses on your own domain in the format you@yourdomain.com. A “catch-all” email, such as mail@yourdomain.com, is a good thing to have, as are a generous number of other email accounts for your employees. Often, hosting providers throw in things like auto responders for when you’re out of pocket, and the ability to access your mail over the Internet, so that you or your employees can check it when they’re away from the office. These are fairly standard features these days, and with the web hosting industry as competitive as it is, you should have no trouble getting decent email service as part of your hosting package.

Uptime and downtime are two words you hope you don’t ever have to use when talking about your business website. Hosting providers have a number of contingency plans up their sleeves to eliminate downtime or at least keep it as brief as possible. They have the ability to distribute the traffic to your site over more than one server if it should reach a level where it’s overwhelming the hardware. If one piece of equipment has a problem, they can begin using a backup server almost immediately. The good web hosting providers can offer you at least 99.8% uptime, and you should accept no less. If they back that with a guarantee, so much the better.

You can check out what others are saying about a hosting company by simply typing the name of the company into a search engine. You sometimes find a treasure trove of information that you couldn’t get otherwise about the company. One word of caution, though: every hosting company that’s been around for any length of time will have a few bad reviews. Sometimes it’s the fault of the company, and sometimes it’s the fault of the client for expecting something different from what was negotiated. The point is, don’t let one or two scathing rants cause you to cross a company off your list. What you should look for is a pattern of complaints over time. Also, if you see nothing but glowing reviews, perhaps you should be a little suspicious. No web hosting service is perfect, and less than scrupulous companies have been known to overload customer feedback sites with planted positive reviews. Most companies are more honest than that, however.

Of course, price is a major consideration. If you’re starting a new business, you definitely don’t want to waste money, either for substandard service or for fancy features you’ll never use. A rule of thumb is to weed out the hosting companies that are very high priced and the ones that are very low priced (or free), and work with the ones that don’t seem too extreme pricewise. Cheap or free hosting isn’t always a good choice for a business site (though they can work fine for personal or hobby sites), and expensive hosting doesn’t always mean you get the best of everything. It may just mean that you’re buying a lot of stuff you don’t need.

Finally, perhaps the most important consideration when choosing a web hosting company is their level of customer and technical support. You should expect real 24/7/365 support from a hosting company that has experience hosting e-commerce sites. This doesn’t mean that they have a voice mail tree that you have to navigate through before having any hope of talking to an actual person. It also doesn’t mean that messages are taken during non-business hours, but addressed during business hours. If you’re the owner of a business website, there are no such things as “business hours.”
The kind of support you should expect is from a real human who is either physically at the server farm or who can hook you up with someone who is. And it shouldn’t matter if you’re calling on a weekend or a holiday: somewhere on the planet, a person may be trying to get on your site and having difficulty, and that needs to be fixed no matter where they are and no matter what time it is. Downtime is money out of your pocket, and you need to work with your hosting provider to eliminate or nearly eliminate it.

Don’t be intimidated at the thought of choosing an Internet hosting provider. They all want your business, so you’re in a relative position of power. Just be aware of those that promise what sounds like too much (such as “unlimited” bandwidth), and steer clear of sites that have histories of poor service or support. That’s the great thing about the Internet: if enough people have trouble with any company, whether it’s a car rental company or an Internet hosting provider, they will talk and put the information out there, hopefully saving you some trouble, too.

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Once you have a written business plan, it’s time to do some research on which hosting firm is most suitable for your website. You will need to know, obviously, if you plan to sell products from your site, or if it will be strictly promotional. Do you plan to have video? Elaborate graphics? Or just text? Will your chosen host provider help you set up your web site? How many email accounts will you need?

There are a number of things you need to know about the hosting companies you choose among. Perhaps the main thing is how reliable their service is. If you have a business website, you can’t afford for it to have downtime. After all, it’s always normal business hours somewhere. Closely tied to the need for reliability is the need for technical support. Many hosting services say that they have so-called 24/7/365 tech support, but their definition of what that comprises may be different from yours. You don’t want to find out the hard way that calling tech support late at night or on a holiday only gets you to an answering machine and that you’ll have to wait for regular business to resume before getting any actual help.

Of course you should ask your candidate hosting companies directly about these things, but you should do something else too. There are forums all over the Internet where people will meet online to talk about such issues. Read these discussion threads. Ask questions. You should be able to get a more objective assessment of an Internet hosting provider than you would from the company itself.
There are, however, two things you should be aware of. The first thing is that every web hosting company that’s been around for any length of time will have some negative feedback. One or two rants about a certain hosting company shouldn’t put you off. It is possible that the user was the one with the problem, and it is also possible that the company has fixed the problem.

The other thing you should know when reading forums is that sometimes hosting companies plant people on them to say good things about them. The rule of thumb should be: discount the overly positive posts on a company, and discount the overly negative, too. Any post filled with capital letters and exclamation marks is suspect. Take your information from the saner posts you come across, and if you’re allowed to join a forum, don’t hesitate to ask questions, particularly about free web hosting companies.

The reason these companies are able to offer free hosting is that they will run ads on your site. These might be unobtrusive ad links, or they may be pop-ups, or they may be the really annoying ads that follow the reader as he or she scrolls down the page. You have to decide if you can live with the annoyance, and if you think your customers will stick around long enough to buy something.
The obvious advantage of free web hosting services is price. You won’t have to register a domain name or pay for hosting. A free web page can serve as a training site for you as you learn how you want your site to look, or test out new promotions. There are free services like sitemeter.com that will gather basic statistics on your site that can give you valuable information on your visitors. You can find out where most of your visitors come from, what time of day they visit, and how many page views they amass.

You could, if you had the time and motivation, use multiple free hosting providers to set up your site, and then monitor all of them to see if one outperforms the rest. You will likely see differences in the different hosts, and quickly learn which ones are the easiest to work with. You may find that one hosting company gets your site indexed by search engines sooner, and therefore drives more traffic to your site.

Or you may decide that free web hosting just isn’t going to be good enough. All you will have lost is time.

The biggest disadvantage to free web hosting is the ads cluttering up the site. Many visitors are turned off by pop-ups that suddenly materialize as they try to enter or leave your site. And a few will click on those ads and leave your site without looking at anything at all.

Even if you eventually choose paid web hosting for the control it gives you over your site, the free websites you set up may still work to your advantage. You never know where your web traffic will come from. Some of it might come through an old free site you set up when you were just starting out. So, while free website hosting may serve you well as you learn how to be a webmaster, if you have any kind of e-commerce function, you’ll almost certainly want to switch to paid hosting at some point.

But if you’re broke and just starting out, or just learning the basics of having your own web site, then free hosting providers may be exactly the right thing for you.

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