How to choose reliable web hosting company for your domain

If you look at the web hosting market, you will find thousands of companies offering web hosting services. This guide will help you to find out which of them are the best for your needs.

Web hosting uptime

What is the hosting uptime? Uptime is the percentage of the time when your website is accessible. Even the most reliable hosting companies need to do a maintenance time to time so you cannot expect 100% uptime. Uptime better than 99.9% is considered excellent, uptime better than 99.75% may be still acceptable for most websites.

Customer support

If you experience any problem with your domain you will need reliable customer support. It may help to check out web hosting forums to find experiences of other webmasters with support teams of various web hosts. Good customer support should be provided 24/7.

Disk space

If you have the content of your website on your hard drive you can easily find out how much space it takes. Keep in mind you may need to upload some larger files like images or movies later. If you are going to host domain with a lot of large files you should consider to sign up for unlimited web hosting plan to avoid troubles with the disk space limit.

Data transfer (bandwidth)

The higher limit, the better. It may happen your domain will be featured on some high traffic website and you will get a lot of visitors in a short time. In such situation the data transfer may be pretty high. For this reason, unmetered bandwidth is a very good option.

Number of emails

If you run a small website you will not need more than a few POP3 accounts. However, if you have a company with many employees and all of them will need their own email, make sure that the web hosting plan offers enough emails.

Number of hosted domains

While some web hosting companies require to buy separate hosting plan for every domain you want to host with them, another web hosts allow to host multiple domain names under one account. If you plan to run many websites, you can save significantly if you sign up for a hosting package which allows to host more than one domain name.

The price

The price may vary depending on the quality and marketing strategy of the web host. If you need only to experiment with your website, free web host may be the right choice for you. For most of small business hosting plans the fair price is between $5 - $10.