Bandwidth, disk space, reliability, and technical support are four big factors anyone looking for a web host provider should consider when making their choice. With so many web hosting providers out there, you shouldn’t have to compromise much (if at all) on these four deal breakers. In general, you want lots of bandwidth, lots of disk space, at least 99.8% uptime, and 24/7/365 live human tech support.

Keep in mind, however, that many hosting companies will offer you a “great deal” on, say 5 GB disk space even though you’ll probably only ever use about 10 MB of it, if that. There are also hosts that offer “unlimited bandwidth,” and you should be skeptical of them, because technically, there isn’t any such thing as unlimited bandwidth.

Cost should definitely be a consideration, and sites like webhostinggeeks.com and others post cost and feature comparisons that can be extremely helpful for those shopping around for web hosting. Other considerations should include whether and how many email accounts are included in the price, whether you get a control panel for routine tasks like changing passwords or adding email accounts, and whether you require a Windows server (which you will if you write or use ASP scripts). Web hosting is very competitive, and you as a customer should take advantage of that to get what you need and what you want for a price that’s reasonable.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Domains and URLs, general business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.