Choosing a Web Hosting Provider - 6 Important Factors You Need to Know

By Jason Chao

When you are looking for a web hosting provider, there are many things need to weigh up. The following 6 factors are most important.

1. Price: when you open the home pages of a web hosting website, the most conspicuous item impacts you is the price. They put the lowest price to attract visitors. Normally, there is a little * mark following the big price number. Now you need to find out what conditions this little * will tell you. Look at the bottom of the page, you will see something like, *Applies to new accounts only, Conditions Apply, or * $x.xx /month pricing is available with a 24 month prepaid billing cycle.

2. Money back policy: some web hosting companies offer 30 days money back guarantee, you need to find out and understand full money back policy. The setup fee and domain registration fee (if applicable) are not refundable. Usually there is certain process to cancel your account, like: "you must contact xxxxxxxxx Customer Team, Monday through Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. or via email at moneyback@xxxxxxxx.com".

3. Hosting features: going through the entire hosting feature list, to be sure listed hosting features are good enough for your website. Sometimes the hosting feature is not defined clearly; you need to check out with the web host. If you need to run a software that is not listed, ask the web host if they have the software included in the hosting package and if you are allowed to use it.

4. Customer support: there are ways to test how good the customer support is. Talking with representatives of the web hosting provider is the best way; making a phone call, chatting online, or sending an email. The direct communication always helps you to make a judgment. Many web hosting providers provide support center or help center on their website to help you find most answers.

5. Free domain name: all top 10 cheap hosting providers offer you free domain with their hosting plans. Some web hosts offer free domain for life or free domain forever services that mean you get free domain registration as long as you keep your hosting account with the host. Some hosts offer free domain registration only for first year or initial contract period. When your contract is renewed, you need to pay your domain registration fee.

6. Bandwidth usage: there are some restrictions on bandwidth usage, even some hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth. Usually they put this condition in "terms of service" section of their website. If you have a high bandwidth usage site, like e commerce site, gaming site, or downloading site, it maybe better to go to dedicated server or VPS hosting.

It is very important to put above 6 items into your web hosting check list. What you eyes tells you is not always truth, because sometimes the truth is hidden somewhere you need to find out.

Jason Chao is an expert in cheap web hosting field and manage a content-rich website of http://cheaphostingchoice.com/

Here is a Quick Way to Justify Your Web Hosting Performance

By Daren Albom

I am sure you have come across web hosting companies that claim to have very good uptime like 99.9%. They will never claim to have 100% because that is impossible to happen for they are dealing with technology that connected together by hundred of other technology to get it operate normally. So if you see somebody claim to have 100% uptime. Just navigate from them and search for the next hosting provider. After all there are tons of them out there.

But even if 99.9%, how do we actually determine they are giving the right uptime? It is kind of impossible to personally guard the website 24 hours a day to make sure it is up and running. How others do is somebody will visit their own website once or twice a day to make sure everything is okay; while some other people will use traffic tracker to check the uptime indirectly. If traffic count drops suddenly without any specific reason then you will know something has gone wrong with the web hosting.

In fact the 2 methods are not very practical and accurate because what if the web hosting goes down for a few times in a day? Traffic count drops but might not be significant. And to make thing worse the dropped traffic is those who will buy. It hurts your business. So this kind of web hosting down time is difficult to trace. The other difficult scenario is what if you have hundred running websites? You will be spending more than half a day just to make sure everything is doing well rather than working on your business.

A simple yet effective way to monitor web hosting uptime is to subscribe to uptime monitor that easily available in the internet. How the tool works is simple. The tool will send a request to your website from time to time (usually 1 minute 1 request). If your web hosting responds in no time, then the web hosting is operating normally, otherwise the tool will record a unit of down time in the report. So the tool will automatically check your web hosting every minute for whole day. You only need to check the report everyday to find out everything.

Usually there are free uptime monitor and paid uptime monitor. Of cause paid service will have a better features and service. However if you do not want to subscribe to paid service yet craving to have a good monitor, a simple way is to search for the web hosting review. This is because sometime the review website has subscribed to those uptime monitor to trace the performance of web hosting and further review them. With that you can enjoy a free service from them. But unfortunately, one thing need your attention is to make sure that your website and the review website are hosting not only just the same web hosting provider but also in the same server in that web hosting company. With that that means you are sharing the web hosting with the review site. This information is easily available in whois. So if you are taking dedicated server then you cannot use this method.

As conclusions, it is utmost importance to make sure the web hosting you got is a quality one. This is because your website and business is 100% dependent on it. If the web hosting goes down, your site follows. So if you realize something is not so right on the providers just change service provider since there are free transfer service nowadays that help to ease the moving.

Daren is a writer and webmaster. His Hostgator web hosting review website provides a better insight on the web hosting leader. For a good quality of web hosting, Daren recommends Hostgator web hosting. Have a look at Daren's Hostgator review.