How to find the right web host

With the number of web hosts available toady, it is a tough task to decide which one will be the best for you. So when in search of a web host you must first get your requirements clear, you must have details of what facilities do you need and the amount of server space required. You must try to find how large a website do you plan to put up, that is whether it will just be a single home page or more pages, how many pages do you want your website should have If it has to be a website where you will be selling things you will need more pages to be setup.

The size and structure will decide what amount of MB space you require to host your website. You can find offers available from 10 MB space to a few GB of space. But you need not jump up for a bigger space offer just because it looks comparatively cheaper; choose the size according to your need but always keeping some extra space for any additions you may want to make in the future. Next thing to consider is the email accounts, how many will you need How do you plan to access these mail accounts whether directly on the web or through email clients like outlook express Do you need mailing list facility Then come issues related to server side scripts, you may need CGI-bin, voting scripts, site search and content management systems. So you must find out whether these facilities are available or not. You may also require server side includes and htaccess password protect directories. Most importantly you will need some kind of a control panel facility to manage your website. Other things to think about are the need for FTP, database management such as mySQL.

That was about your possible requirements, but there is another important issue to address which is your paying capacity. You have to decide what your proposed budget is and how do you wish to pay, that is whether monthly or yearly plans suit you. For a small website your payment per month should come to around 10 dollars. Within your budget you can get the best facilities to suit your requirement if you do some good search and comparison on the internet.

With your budget and feature requirements in place you will be in a better state to start searching for web hosts. Ideally you can make a big list and start narrowing this list to where you are left with just 3 to 4 options. Make a relative comparison of the facilities on offer as also how cost effective are the offers.

When all this is done you can evaluate the selected few on the checklist provided below.

• What is the server up time You must try for a 99 percent up time.

• Check for the knowledge base and the support section available from the hosting service provider. A simple list of FAQs is just not enough look for the detailed guides available to get more detailed answers to your queries.

• How is the customer and technical support facility Are there feedback forms, email support and telephone numbers available. Also see to it that the support is available 24 hours a day. Even try to make a contact with some question to see how fast and efficient is the support system. This will help in getting an idea as to how soon will help arrive when you face a problem in future. The response time for emails should preferably not exceed 12 hours, if it is more you can strike the host out or your list.

• Check for the attitude they have towards the customers, are they friendly and approachable. This aspect can be determined from the communication you may have with them. You may have loads of questions and you do have the right to have all or these answered. Ask a few questions to each of the hosts and see how their attitude changes with more number or questions. You might want to strike off hosting services that get impatient and irritated with the increasing number of questions from you.

• Look for a 30 day trial offer, as most reliable and good hosts would provide this facility to all their new customers. Within this 30 day span you will be able to judge the performance of the hosting service and can shift over without much of a hassle to some other host if this one doesn't stand up to your expectations.

• The other things to look for are monthly bandwidth usually 1 GB is fine for a small site, sub domains, custom error page, secure server, spam filter, free scripts, web based email, server side includes and anonymous FTP and so on.

Now with the check list you will be able to evaluate the short listed web hosting services. If there are questions to which you have not found an answer on their website you must ask them for details on all such issues. Often there are issues which you feel have not been addressed or you may need to reconfirm the information available. Whatever be the case just go forward and ask about it, there is no point repenting later. In fact you must make a list of questions for each of the hosts and send them across, this way you will get the answers to your queries and also you will be able to judge how fast and efficient their support system is. Once you have the answers from each of the hosts you will certainly know which one of them has the most ideal web hosting solution for you.