How To Find The Best Web Hosting Company

Finding a good hosting company is easy.

If you put in the effort you can go one step better and find a good web hosting company that provides a hosting plan, support and additional services that perfectly meet your requirements.

The first thing I look for is where my hosting is.

There is no point buying hosting on a server that is in Russia, if your target market will mostly be in the UK.

So I always try and find a local hosting provider if a project is targetted locally to my country.

Sometimes a project will be aimed internationally, possibly to the USA. In this case it would make sense to get US hosting. I personally would still get UK Web Hosting.

Use the Flagfox plugin. This adds a small icom to the bottom of the Mozilla status bar, telling you where the host's IP address points to.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that in life the cheapest isn't going to the best. Web hosting is no different. If you go for cheap web hosting one of the following will invariably happen:

• You will find that you didn't buy enough bandwidth, and as soon as your site gets remotely successful - bang - you have hit your bandwidth limits and it gets taken offline or they demand more money
• You try to put a blog on your site, or anything that requires a database - and you find you don't have one
• You try to host another website, and find out you have to pay the same price all over again, whereas if you had got hosting with add on/multiple domains, you could have just added on another site
• Your site goes slow because your web host has over-sold the shared server your site is hosted on

This isn't to say you should always buy the most expensive hosting, but it is true that you that you frequently get what you pay for with web hosting

This can be different for everyone, but as a Web Designer, I can tell you what I look for in a web host.

• Look reliable
• Hosted in the UK, or local to project
• cPanel or a good Control Panel installed?
• Do they have "add on domains" so I can expand?
• Do they have MySQL databases (for Wordpress etc)?
• How many databases?
• What bandwidth and diskspace do they offer?
• Phone number?
• Do they seem like nice chaps?

You don't want a company that will cause you head ache in the future, or will result in your site being offline for a week.

If you are a business then you need business class hosting - because even an hour offline can mean missed revenue.

This will allow you to do tasks without having to ask the hosting company each time.

Do they offer them for free and how many do they offer?

If you want to use Wordpress to any other decent CMS you will need a database.

Many companies will try and charge you for this - I would try and get a host that includes one in the first place.

Its a good idea to get a host that allows you to Add On Domains - allowing you to expand and hosts more websites. Otherwise you will have to pay for extra websites you host, even if you have enough bandwidth and diskspace left.

A nice number of add on domains is 2, 5, 10....

I do sometimes look for hosts that offer "unlimited add on domains" as is it possible to find reasonably cheap companies that do this. However it is widely regarded that a company that offers unlimited domains too cheaply will be unlikely to survive in the long-run... So it goes back to the Cheap Web Hosting / Reliability thing. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is!

Unless you are really running a mikey-mouse site that will get no visitors at all (and whats the point of that!) I would get at least 5gb a month bandwidth and 5gb webspace.

Some sites will only use up 150mb of diskspace however, so don't worry too much about the webspace if you really do only need hosting for one website.

Make sure your host is reliable - give them a call and ask how they are!

The longer it takes to actually get through to a human, the more I get annoyed... I don't want to go with a host that treats me like a number.

Similarly I don't want a host that won't be able to support me and offer reliability so I ideally do want them to answer the phone!

A good web hosting company should be local to your target market.

A good web hosting company should be stable and reliable.

Make sure they meet your demands, and think about what might need over the course of the year, rather than just about what you need now. Planning ahead might save you money in the long run.