3 Tips to Help You Select a Good Web Hosting Provider

By Jason Chao

The web hosting market is very competitive. Finding a good hosting provider is not an easy thing. Fortunately, it's not as hard as finding a pearl in sands. If you know following 3 tips, you will even pick up the best web host quickly.

1. checking the infrastructure information

Usually you can get infrastructure information from a web host's website. Owning a data center shows the solid foundation of a web host. If the hosting company has its own data center instead of co-locating with others or rent a server from others, it shows the good reliability of the hosting server. A lot of resellers have no ability to control the rented equipments.

2. testing the customer support

24/7 customer support is the absolutely essential service. When your website is down, you need to reach some body that can solve the problem right away. The best way is to make a phone call to the web host. You can also use online chat and email to do the test. They should answer you within acceptable waiting time. The technicians should have good technical knowledge to solve problems.

Some hosting service providers only offer email support. How can you trust somebody whom you can not reach when you need? Don't waste your time on such web hosts. Go to other hosting companies that offer 24/7 telephone support.

3. looking up the company reputation

You can search feedback and user reviews on a web hosting provider. You can use keywords like "how is xxx hosting", "is xxx web hosting good" to do the research. Some forum website and review website are good resources to help you making judgment. A good web hosting provider gets most positive feedback from their customers. If a web host gets many negative feedback from users, you should put a question mark in your mind. The good reputation is not set up within a short time; it is built up step by step. Good reputation shows the reliability and quality of web hosting services.

Choosing a good web hosting provider is so important for your internet business that you have to make your decision seriously. Good hosting server providers should have solid infrastructure, highest level customer support, and good reputation. Keeping above 3 tips in mind will lead you to the right track.

Jason Chao is an expert in cheap web hosting field and manage a content-rich website of http://cheaphostingchoice.com/, which offers hosting beginner guide, web hosting article, web hosting FAQ, and reviews of free domain hosting, discount hosting, top 10 cheap hosting.

4 Solid Drawbacks Your Free Hosting Providers Will Never Tell You

By Daren Albom

If you are a newbie in web developing and web hosting, chances are you have come across free web hosting before. Perhaps you have some blogs or websites are currently being hosted on free hosting as well. To tell you the truth, there will be drawbacks using free hosting instead of paid service.

Yes you will save up some money for web hosting. However the money you save is far much less than what you lose up. Why say so because by hosting your website on a free web hosting, your site not only is unsecured (uncertain down and up time) you also leave a bad image to your users and visitors. This is because of the reasons below.

Firstly, usually free web hosting will put advertisement on your web hosting. This is how the service providers make money. By putting advertisements here and there within your website definitely give an unprofessional image on your website. Some advertisements like "free smiley" look very spammy and I am sure your visitors will not like it. Further more the advertisements give no money share to you. Hosting on free web hosting is sometimes like building website to help others making money.

Secondly, you get uncertain up and down time. Well I believe some free hosting has a stable uptime but they mostly cannot give you 99.9% uptime like what Hostgator web hosting guarantee. Also when your web site is down, you cannot do anything nor make any complaints. Because you host free with them and you are not entitled to question it. Perhaps you will not have a medium to ask what is happening as well. So if you are having your business hosted there, imagine the losses you could have.

Thirdly, if you are hoping to be ranked in search engine, free web hosting definitely hurts. Of cause I do not know the behind scene of the search engine algorithm but it can be easily seen in the search engine result page that almost none of the websites are hosted on free web hosting. Sites hosted on free hosting just do not rank well. Perhaps to eliminate the possible spam web site in free hosting, search engines eliminate the ranking totally.

Fourthly you will not have much flexibility in free web hosting. You will not get unlimited storage space nor free scripting. You cannot host a lot of data too (in fact you think twice to host important data for the hosting dependability). For most of the time your bandwidth is fixed too. When there are too many users connect to your site, automatically your site will be shut down. And remember you will not have a medium to check what is going on.

These four reasons indeed are the most powerful reasons that you are not encouraged to host with free hosting. If you are serious on your website, then just pay some bucks and get yourself a piece of web hosting. After all the charges nowadays is not that expensive. Easily you can get $4.95/month hosting and it is a very good piece of hosting already with unlimited storage, bandwidth, add on domains and so on.

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