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General Guidelines | Article #238 :WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN HOSTING

Well, you’re about to set up your first website. However, before you can even do that, you need to find a hosting company. The problem is, there are so many hosting companies to choose from. It’s enough to make you go stir crazy. How can you tell a good one from a bad one? Well, hopefully, this brief guide will give you a good starting point for finding a hosting company that will suit your needs.

The first thing you want to stay away from is free hosting. The reasons are too numerous to go into here.  For starters, there are too many restrictions with free hosting, not the least of which is disk storage and band width. Any kind of fairly successful Internet business making even as little as $2000 a month would never survive with a free hosting company because they’d probably exceed their monthly bandwidth limit before the month was even over. And if you want to store large files on your server, forget it. Most free hosting will give you 10 meg at most.

Plus, with free hosting, you have to deal with putting up their banner ads and whatever other garbage they’ll have you display when you put up your site. This ends up making your site less than professional looking.

Okay, so now that we’ve ruled out free hosting, what about paid hosting? Not all paid hosting is alike. You really have to be careful when choosing even a paid hosting company.

The first thing you have to stay away from is if you see an ad that reads something like this…

“Unlimited Hosting Special…$2 a month: Unlimited disk storage and bandwidth. 100% uptime guaranteed.”

Okay, first of all, there is no such thing as unlimited disk storage and bandwidth. There comes a point in time where you will eventually run out of both of these things. It is a fact of web hosting. As for the 100% uptime guarantee, nobody can promise this. Servers go down. It happens. And I won’t even mention the price. Yes, you don’t have to pay a fortune for hosting, but $2 a month is a red flag that tells me that something is very wrong.

What you want to look for is a hosting company that gives you good solid figures. This is an example of an ad for a hosting company that I would definitely consider going with.

“Quality Hosting…$9.95 per month: 10 gig of disk space and 10 gig bandwidth monthly. 98% uptime guaranteed. All support requests handled in under 24 hours.”

That to me is the ad of a hosting company that sounds legit and realistic. It is certainly a hosting company that I would consider going with after researching them to see if they’ve had any serious customer issues.

With web hosting, just like with anything else, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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