How do I find a top web host?

There are thousands of hosting services online, all of which would like to sign you up. The benefits to the hosting company of finding new customers is that they are getting not just a one-off payment from you, but a subscription that may last for years. Because there is so much money to be made, hosting services and companies tend to oversell themselves, both literally in terms of putting too many subscribers on the same server, and in terms of self-promotion and statements about how good their service actually is.

So how do you select a top web host or a top ten web host from all the hosting offers available?

Making a selection depends partly on what you intend to do with your site (a hobby site will need different features to an ecommerce site, which will need different features to an image hosting site, and so on).

However, we can focus on the features that everyone will need. Here are the things that we think are important.

1. Uptime.
This is the percentage of time that the hosting service guarantees the server will be serving your pages. This should be stated on the hosting service's web site, and you shouldn't consider a host that is not up for 99.5% of the time or more. Some services define uptime as the server being actually switched on, whether or not it is fully serving HTTP, ftp, mail, sql and so on. This is simply ridiculous. Try to check this, and read the host's customer forums for complaints about uptime before you sign up.

Uptime is the main factor you should be concerned about in your hosting choices – if your readers or customers regularly can't get to your site, all your web creation, optimization and promotion efforts are in vain.

Next page: Finding the Best web host