Personal web hosting - what to look for

If you are looking for personal web hosting, to start your own web site for the first time, here are some things to think about.

Any search for personal web hosting or personal web site hosting will reveal hundreds of companies and services, offering plans of various kinds, and all promising secure, reliable and easy to use hosting.

How do you choose between them? Should you use free hosting? What bandwidth, disk space and extra features do you actually need?

To answer these questions, you should first accept that what you need in personal web hosting is exactly the same as you would need if you were wanting to set up a commercial web site. The main things you need are simple - server reliability (minimal downtime) so that visitors can always get to your pages; good support from the hosting service, so that you get fast answers and solutions; reliable, archived statistics, so that you can see how your site's visitor numbers are going and where your traffic is coming from.

You will find that the other issues - bandwidth, disk space offered and so on are very similar from host to host. You will find that most free hosting uses advertising to cover its costs, and this will just annoy your visitors. For $5-10 a month or less you can get perfectly good personal web hosting with no intrusive ads.

So if hosts are all very similar how do you actually choose between them? Do this - make a short list of likely hosts, then use a search engine to search on the company name. You will encounter comments on the hosting service in forums, blogs, and sites like Yahoo Answers. Reading the comments carefully will give you a feel for the quality of service the host gives. You could also check the specialist web hosting forums, where users rate the popular companies.

After you have signed up, you may be happy at first but find there are hosting problems as the company gets bigger, is onsold, or just stops caring about its customers.

In this case, if you made sure you bought your domain independently (not from the hosting service) you will be able to move to another host if you have problems.

You may also find that as your personal web site grows it becomes more popular, and you then want to monetize it. As you have followed our advice and signed up with a decent hosting service which caters for ecommerce sites (and not a free hosting service) you will be able to put on ads, affiliate links, Adsense and all the rest without any restrictions. Personal web hosting does not mean that you should be held back in any way when you wish to expand and exploit your web site.