There is a lot to be said about finding and keeping a good website hosting provider. Good web hosting can make a huge difference in the overall success of your online business. It can even affect the success of an offline business who uses the internet to help people find them. I want to go over the ways to find a good hosting provider.

IP Overload

Have you ever heard of IP address overload? If not... Have you ever heard of GoDaddy? Enough said!

When an IP address has too many websites associated with it, it makes it very hard for your website to be reliable in terms of time online. One of my clients had a site hosted on GoDaddy and their site was timing out 4 out of every 5 tries. This is not good! Especially if you are trying to optimize your website for the search engines. After a simple purchase of a dedicated IP address, this site was ranking well in the search engines and making way more money!

This is why it is vital to your success to host your website with a company who doesn't overload their shared IP addresses, or a company who offers very cheap dedicated IP addresses for your account.

Downtime

Many times, with a shaky web host, I mean those website hosting companies who run their business out of their garages, you will experience lots and lots of downtime. This kind of goes hand in hand with our first problem, except this downtime can be caused by more than just IP address overload. When your website is down, your customers cannot come to your site and make you money. That is why it is vital to find a reliable web hosting company who can provide you with little to no downtime.

Usability

I have tested just about every hosting company online. You know what I have found? Some of them have really crappy control panels. Some of them make it almost impossible to find where you need to go to get your site online. I am not going to mention any by name, but those are the sites that you should stay away from.

Hosting providers that offer easy to use control panels will allow you to save time in managing your website... and saving time means saving money!

Additional Features

On my lists of favorite website hosting companies are those who offer loads and loads of value to their customers. When I am talking value, I mean additional features that go above and beyond traditional web hosting.

Some of the awesome features that web hosting providers are offering these days are one click installs of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, and other popular web applications. Some are even offering high quality, good looking website templates. This is a huge perk for those of us who want to put a website up, but don't have the skill or the money to obtain a professional design.

In addition to these, the best website hosting companies are offering free Google Adwords credits and credit for Yahoo and Miva pay per click marketing. This is a great way to get your website off the ground relatively quickly.

Customer Service

One of the most important things that I look for in ANY company is "non outsourced", "in-house" customer support. The type of support that knows their stuff because they actually work for the company. I also look for companies who are fast to respond to issues that arise with hosting accounts and those companies who can fix those problems super fast. This is a huge thing to me and I am sure that it is huge for other individuals as well.

These are just some of the biggest things to look for when selecting a high quality web hosting provider. There are others, but not as important as those listed above. Good luck in your quest to find the best website hosting providers.