If experts are to be believed, most people dont have a personal web page or a business web site. But that does not mean that there may not be a day when you feel the urge to promote a product or invention or just share your thoughts with the online world. Statistically, there are thousands of web hosts to choose from out there. But the pivotal question is how do you go about choosing the right one for you and do it without getting ripped off in the process. Majority of people feels they do not have enough knowledge or experience to get a web page or web site up on the Internet. So they are wary to even try.

But the fact of the matter is you have a choice of using free hosting which gives you a small amount of space and bandwidth on their domain. On the other hand, you can have your own domain name and pay a small fee for this privilege. If you choose to use a free host provider then your site address will be something like:

YourName.HostDomainName.com or HostDomainName.com/YourName. It is worth noting that the free services also force you to have advertisements on your website to pay for your free service. Few people prefer not to have advertisements on their sites and they want to have their own personal and/or business domain name. For example www.YourName.com or YourName.US or .org or .net. If this is what you are interested in then you want to find the web host that is right for you.

First and foremost you should make a short list of things you want to do on your web site and make a list of things you want from your potential web host. Moreover, as far as things you want to do on your site, that is a personal choice and one cannot tell you what you can and cannot do. But below is a small list of things that you can setup and do easily on a personal web site:

• Personal Website

• Picture Gallery

• Discussion Forums

• Blogs

• E-Commerce Store and Shopping Cart

• Guest Books

• Mailing Lists

• Polls and Surveys

• Content Management

• Contact Management

• Auction Site (Similar to E-Bay)

• Website Building Tools

• FAQs

• Wikis

And much much more! But the good news is that most of the software required to do all of the above is included with most web hosting packages at no extra cost. But there is bad news too. If you dont have much computer know how it can be difficult to install and start running the software mentioned above. But the fact remains that there are web hosts out there that can and will help you as little or as much as you need to get going on the Internet.

Next you need to make a list of things you want from your potential web host.

Good server uptime guarantee (You should insist on 99.7% or more uptime)

24/7 Technical Support via e-mail

• An address and phone where you can call if you need to talk to a real person

• A host that specializes in supporting New Web Users Called Newbies

• A realistic requirement of how much disk space and bandwidth you really need

• Which Operating System do you want/need

• No requirement to buy your domain name from the web host

It is worth noting that a good web host will publish their Terms of Service (TOS) on their website. This TOS should consists of an uptime guarantee and refund policy. It should also include the hosts need to provide you with 24/7 support via e-mail as a minimum. On the other hand, some better hosts also provide online chat and a phone number to call with technical problems. According to experts, part of their support for your billing and customer support needs should be e-mail and a telephone number. Be scare of hosts that do not provide an alternate way of contact other than e-mail.

It is impossible to find a host that will truly support a newbie but they can be found. As a matter of fact some newbies will require a minimum amount handholding and some will require a walk through and some will require that the host do most everything for them. In that scenario, expect to pay extra for a host that will design and manage your web site for you. You must be aware of how much disk space and bandwidth you will require. Majority of people doesnt really know how much they need or want and will over estimate their requirements sometimes by 100 fold. Most web sites use between 50MB and 100MB.

On the other hand, most E-Commerce store sites use less than 1,000MB (or 1GB) of storage. If you are just starting out you should start with an account with at least 200MB and no more than 500MB for a personal web page and at least 1 GB for a small business site and at least 2GB for an online store. Most people see advertisements from web hosts with extremely huge amounts of each or unlimited amounts at ridiculously low prices. It is advisable to stay away from these hosts because hosts like this tend to sell more space and bandwidth than they have. All this will cause you to have poor uptime of your website, a lot of sending in support tickets for problems and the frustration of having to deal with these problems. In addition, you will not get the support you are truly looking for because they have to cut back somewhere in order to stay in business. Speaking of which it would be a matter of concern to find your web site down and the host ran off with your money just because you didnt want to pay a little extra. To choose which Operating System you are interested in is easy. You have a basic choice of two, Linux/Unix and Windows.