The Best Web Hosting – 4 Critical Factors for Picking a Good Host

Picking the wrong web hosting can be one of the most frustrating experiences on the planet. Imagine picking the perfect domain name and working for months on web design only to reach a roadblock with your domain hosting, and no matter how much you try you can't get it to work.

I've been fortunate to only make a few mistakes before discovering the best web hosting. Here are a few tips to help you find the best:

1) Most Importantly: When we buy website hosting, we're not really buying server space and bandwidth. If we were then hosting should cost like 0.25 a month. What we're really buying is technical support, and if you've ever dealt with technical support for anything, you know that very few companies do it well. Good tech support is the first thing to look for, but you can't trust a "24/7 Support Guarantee" because they all say that. You'll have to search around the web to find real stories about the company's quality of support.

2) Control Panel Software: Your control panel is where your go to create and alter your website. I wouldn't mess with anything but cpanel. CPanel has been around forever and keeps getting easier to use. Some large companies have their own funky, in-house control panels, while some smaller companies might use obscure software. I would suggest only using a web host with cpanel, and a top web host should provide it.

3) FTP Access: FTP access gives you the ability to download, edit, and upload large files to your site. Some web design companies will require you to commit to a hosting agreement for 6 months or a year before they design your site. This is fine if its a good deal, but be sure that any web hosting company you use gives you ftp access. If they don't, then you won't be able to make large-scale changes or move your site to another host; they're basically holding your website hostage so that you have to use them for design and hosting.

4) Other Criteria: Most web hosting companies are very similar. They all seem offer "unlimited bandwidth" and "unlimited disk space". I wouldn't settle for less than 10 gb bandwidth and 1 gb disk space.

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The Best Web Hosting – 4 Critical Factors © 2011