Choosing the right web hosting provider for your website can be a difficult task, especially for those first timers. There are a lot of web hosting providers offering different type of packages, from premium to the least expensive ones. But how do you really pick one?. Here are some guides that you may find useful in making your decision:

Determine Your Needs

The first thing that you actually need to do is to identify your needs. What type of website are you going to host?. Is it your own personal website/blog? Or you probably running an online store?. Different type of websites comes with different requirement. For instance, a personal homepage or blog does not require a very big space or bandwidth compared to large enterprise website.

What’s Your Budget?

This is another important criteria that will help you to make the right decision. If you have a very minimum budget, you may look for a package for personal or Small & Medium Enterprise (SME) as they’re usually affordable. Web hosting providers with dedicated servers and IP address usually comes with higher rate compared to others offering budget hosting with limited space and bandwidth as they’re targetted for big businesses. You may also want to consider getting a free web hosting services at no cost. However, it may not suitable for those generating income from their websites as free web hosting usually will place their own advertisements on your page.

Reliability and Uptime

A good service providers will offer uptime of up to 99%. You may check their claims on their Terms of Services (TOS) at their website prior signing up. This will be an assurance for you as they have announced their service level. If they failed to keep up with their uptime guarantee, you can contact and ask them for rebate or refund. Besides, their infrastructure speed is also important to ensure your site visitors can access your site quickly.

Technical Support

Having a good webhosting service is not enough without a good technical support. A good technical support should have a good response time to address your web hosting related issue. With a fast troubleshooting time, you could reduce the downtime in the event of technical glitch.

Data Transfer and Disk Space

Data transfer or bandwidth needs grow along with your website. It is best to pay for amount of bandwidth that you required upfront, rather than getting a overcharge bill. Ensure that you have sufficient amount of disk space.
A normal websites require less than 3GB of space.

Control Panel & Scripts

This feature gives you an easy way of navigating your web hosting features. Control panel like CPanel is an automated point-and-click hosting platform. Difficult tasks that usually performed using a command line are replaced by user interfaces to help users. CPanel is designed with different levels of administrations including admin and and users. Scripts on the other hand gives you a full control on what to be installed or run on the server. Fantastico is an example of commercial script library that automates the installation of web based applications into a website.