Web Hosting - how to find a good host

A Web host (or hosting provider) is basically a company that has many computers connected to the Internet. They have the equipment and technical skills to provide you with the space, tools and support for creating your website, and to enable your website to be viewed by the world, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

There are thousands of companies that offer Web hosting services. They all look pretty much the same and choosing a good host is very difficult endeavor since you can get excellent or lousy service for the same price. It's much better to do it right the first time, than to move from one host to another spending time and money.

How to choose a good host

Good doesn't mean expensive. In short, good means reliable with excellent support. My recommendations how to choose a good host from the bulk of Web hosting providers...

  1. Even if your site needs only 1 MB of space and 1 GB of bandwidth like the vast majority of sites, choose a host that offers much more - several hundred MB of storage space and not less than 5-10 GB of bandwidth. It ensures that they don't host too many sites on one physical computer and their network isn't overloaded.
  2. Choose a host that offers risk free sign up with money back guarantee. Those that do are more confident about high quality of their hosting.
  3. An important feature to look for is whether they do a backup of your files every day. In case of a hard drive failure they can quickly restore your data from the backup copy.
  4. Customer support is very important. To test it before opening an account, call or email them with a sample question to check the quality and speed of their response. Although this doesn't guarantee that they will respond at the same speed if you do become a customer, this approach is rather accurate.
  5. If you are new to website building, choose a host that has a built-in website builder. A good website builder enables anyone to create a professional looking website - even complete novices.
One of the best ways to find a good host is reading experiences and opinions of clients of the actual hosting companies. It's a good idea to see what other people are saying about each provider and learn from their mistakes.

Dr. Andy Williams (one of the best known Internet marketers and SEO experts) has recently surveyed the readers of his popular EzSEO Newsletter. He asked them to enter scores for the hosts that they had actually used in the last 2 years on the scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (perfect).

Top 4 Web hosts:

#1 - HostMonster (Score 8.9)
Unlimited disk space and bandwidth, free website builder, $6.95/month.

#2 - Lunarpages (Score 8.1)
Unlimited disk space and bandwidth, $8.95/month.

#3 - HostGator (Score 8.0)
Unlimited disk space and bandwidth, free website builder, $5.56/month.

#4 - BlueHost (Score 8.0)
Unlimited disk space and bandwidth, free website builder, $6.95/month.