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Nowadays, anyone can afford to order a feature-packed web hosting plan for next to nothing. However, affordable price is not the only criterion which should be considered when purchasing web hosting services. In this article, I’ll explain the basics of what you should look for in choosing a web hosting company, not just concentrating on the best price and features, but also on reliability and honesty. You’re investing your money and effort into finding paying customers and you wouldn’t like to lose them in order to save a few dollars per month on a web hosting service.

When looking for a web hosting company, it doesn’t matter if this is just for the inception of a website or to move an established site; you need to consider a large selection of criteria to determine which company to go with:

Customer support is the most important aspect in choosing a web hosting company. Website hosting service isn’t just storage or bandwidth. Based on personal experience and that of others, even a top-notch service is worthless without customer support. If you own a business website, your hosting provider needs to be there for you 24/7 and give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your problem; otherwise, you may end up losing customers and money.

Essentially, there are two rules regarding reliability that one should look at

1. You should check if there is an uptime guarantee offered. A truly service-oriented provider will also give a money-back guarantee, offering a discount or free service as compensation for downtime. Any company which avoids taking responsibility won’t put much effort into the service.

2. I definitely wouldn’t go with a company claiming 100% uptime, as there is no such thing as a server with 100% uptime. If anyone ever claims their server has a 100% uptime they are either lying or they don’t perform the necessary upgrades that prevent a machine from being compromised.

Next thing is back up. There is no hosting company which is 100% safe against different types of technical and program failures, so make sure that the company runs scheduled backups. Checking acceptable use policy is another important thing. I’m sure you don’t want to put your business at risk and have your website hosted on the same server together with illegal pornography and software sites, so check the hosting company’s acceptable use policy to find out, if the host takes care of what’s hosted on their servers.

Hosting your site on an uncared-for server will also result in a low speed. If somebody on the same server sends spam, the server’s IP address will be blacklisted and you’ll have serious problems as recipients stop receiving your emails.

When you buy a domain name together with a website hosting package, make sure the host will register the domain name under your name. If the hosting company registers domains under someone else’s name, you may have problems switching hosting providers later. The most popular web hosting management software currently available is cPanel. It’s a next-generation web hosting control panel system that allows you to manage your domain through a web interface. The idea is to transfer as much of the control of managing your web site to you; you have the ability to manage all aspects of e-mail, files, backup, FTP, CGI scripts, and web site statistics.

So the check list will be:

• Choose a hosting provider who has 24/7 customer service support
• Downtime guarantee and service monitoring
• Backups
• Acceptable use policy
• Unlimited bandwidth and web space
• Domain name ( Of course will be yours)
• Control Panel
• Value-added services

If you follow the above guidelines, you will be a winner with your.  Have you decided to choose a web hosting company for your blog or site?

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