Deciding which web hosting is the best for you is not a very easy task. It depends on a number of factors.
One of the first considerations should be your budget. How much you are willing to spend. Bear in mind that this is a recurring expense. You should go for a plan which you will be able to afford in the foreseeable future. There is no point in putting up a fancy website if you are going to run out of money.
Another point to be considered is what you want out of your website. Is it something you can run with your extra pocket money? Is it going to be a vanity website that you put up just for the pleasure of having one? Such things do exist on the web. In that case you want to keep it simple and small. Do have some products or services you want to sell? Then you can start thinking about something more elaborate. Whereas in the first case, you can settle for a low storage space and low bandwidth site, in the second case you will need a bit more space and definitely more bandwidth. You will also need some way to drive traffic to your site. That usually means SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. Look for web hosting that provides it.
Your needs may be a lot more. You may want to sell a number of products online. Now we are looking at a fully fledged ecommerce package. That means lot of storage, lots of bandwidth for speed, and also dynamic capabilities such as PHP or ASP.NET and database capabilities. That is going to be expensive, but you are in it to make money, so it’s worth it. Again, driving traffic to your site is of supreme importance. So SEO is again a must have. Remember, Search Engine Ranking is your mantra here. Of course you can decide to start smaller and upsize as the need arises. That may be wiser. There could be hidden costs involved here. Some providers resort to bandwidth throttling with lower end packages, and you cannot afford that. Also the technology involved in constructing such a site, could possibly beyond your capabilities. If you have to entrust the job of constructing and maintaining a site to some professional or organization, that is another recurring cost that you have to add to your budget.
As you go up the ladder, reliability becomes more and more important. Be very picky about this. Lack of reliability equates to loss of sales, and that’s not what you are in the business for. Site uptime is of great importance as is dependable support. After all is said and done, sites can and do go down. What has to be seen to is how fast it is back online. Fancy specs may look good on paper or on screen, but an unreliable web hosting provider is likely to be your downfall. Web hosting that provides excellent round the clock support is absolutely essential.
