How to choose web hosting company

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Anybody 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.

How to, choose, web hosting, company, tips, trics, be aware, advices

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

Customer support
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.

Downtime guarantee and service monitoring
Having a personal website go down is a minor inconvenience; having a business website go down is a serious matter. What amount of profit would you lose if your site had been down for a week? Long downtime may be very harmful to today's companies which spend large amounts of money on advertising their websites. 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.

Backups
There is no host which is safe against different types of technical and programical failures, so make sure that the company runs scheduled backups. The other advice would be always having a backup of your website yourself, as you never know what might happen. cPanel, which is the most popular web hosting management software at this time, has a very comfortable backup-making tool. It allows you to backup files and databases quickly and easily, so backups are no longer a problem.

Guarantees
Just like you need to test drive a new car before you commit to buying it, you should be able to try out a web hosting provider and their services before committing to having your site hosted by them. Rarely (though occasionally) will this come in the form of a free trial. More often than not, it’ll come in the form of a money-back guarantee. Fine with us. 30 days is the minimum. 90 is especially nice.

Speed and reliability of the servers and hardware
Make sure they have a high-speed connection (preferably T3 or higher) to the Internet.
Effective Bandwidth Management – opt for unlimited bandwidth for your site.
Backup Systems – good hosts will have back up systems in place to guard against power failures, which will cause you to lose data and customers.

What can you expect to pay?
Expect to pay $5 - $10/month for a small web hosting package of 1-100 GB of allocated space for your site. This will be enough for up to 20 pages with a few graphics on each page. You may find less expensive ones if you are lucky. Most small web sites use only 10-30 MB. Make sure you can upgrade your hosting plan, should your site expand.

When you sign up for a monthly service, there is usually no fixed length contract, so you can terminate your contract at any time. Your commitment is month to month although you often will get a discount if you sign up for 1-2 years.