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How to Choose The Best Web Host for You

By: James Collinsworth

These days, every web host under the sun claims to be the best value and generally the cream of the crop.

But how do you TRUTHFULLY know `which is the best web host?

Firstly you need to break it down to what you need, which is either 3 families of web hosting: Shared, VPS, or Dedicated web hosting.

However, you are most likely after shared hosting, which is entry and medium level hosting for small to medium sites. Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting and Dedicated Hosting are both more costly but can handle the resource demands on more big web site.

An Excellent Web Host’s Control Panel:

This is the display that will let you tweak your site settings and even view your visitor statistics, such as which web site they came from, which country they are in and some other details. Without this, everything becomes 10 times harder. Creating an email account to use will suddenly take an hour of research instead of 20 easy seconds and will suddenly require almost programmer level skills without this easy interface. Your Control Panel makes doing any of this, easy for absolutely anyone. Only go with web hosting companies offering “cPanel” (or possibly even, “DirectAdmin”). If they don’t offer these, look elsewhere.

An Excellent Web Host’s Support:

Every person wants decent web hosting support that will answer their questions fast. But if you are paying $3 a month, you can’t expect support that’s going to be that great. But some support should hopefully be available. Check if they have a phone number to call (most won’t – which isn’t that much of a bad thing), but if they have a “Live Support” chat button, that’s a bonus plus, and a very practical thing to have available to you in case you need to contact them quickly.

An Excellent Web Host’s Reliability and Uptime

If they aren’t offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, look elsewhere. Downtime is stressing and costly for anyone advertising their web sites. Web visitors that come to your site when it’s down, will be very turned off to coming back. The better way to learn of of their reliability is to read reviews and other people’s outlooks. However a fast way to test speed (but not quite dependable) is to see how fast the host’s own web page loads up for you, which can give you an clue of what kind of speed your site can expect.

An Excellent Web Host’s Free Scripts

If the web hosting company you want to consider, is using cPanel, they will very often provide you with over 50+ free easy-to-install scripts through an attachment known as “Fantastico”. This is very useful, as it includes entire e-commerce shopping carts, blogging software, forum scripts and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not absolutely required, but certainly comes in useful.

An Excellent Web Host’s Per Month Pricing

Now if you are like a good number of people. You want good value, and don’t want to use up a lot of money on web hosting. Web Hosting has become a “commodity” item with plenty of competition. You can even find web hosts offering hosting for a measly $2 a month. However, you can expect downtime and slowness and emotional distress with these confusingly cheap web hosts. End result, not worth saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than lollies web hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that’s over 5 times the amount of our 2 dollar competition. But this means the web host can actually afford to give you top support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and actually run fast.

In truth, you WILL pay far more with a super-cheap web host because of downtime, unusual slowness, lost visitors and lost revenue, poor support, and your own frustration when you check and see your website is down and your host is out of reach to help – or don’t offer any. Web hosting is truly something that will bite you in the behind if you go with the lowest-cost is best mentality and that is the rock-hard.

Article Source: http://www.articlesinsight.com

About The Hosting Guru: J Collinsworth has been online since 1996, and has time-tested many different web hosts and gives away Discount Web Hosting coupons for time-tested quality web hosts. Visit his website for more information: www.HostgatorReview.info

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