Web hosting companies

If you are new to be hosting, and trying to decide between various web hosting companies, here is some advice.

(If you just want to read about some good hosts, you can just go straight to our recommended web hosts page.)

These are the factors which are important when considering which web hosting company to choose - traffic and bandwidth and disk space, host reliability, technical support, scripts and access, multi-site hosting, and the monthly price of the service.

Let's look at all of these now.

1. Traffic and bandwidth and disk space.
This issue used to be critical, but the amount of monthly bandwidth and the disk space offered by a typical hosting company has gone up rapidly in recent times, and moist hosts are fairly generous here. Some hosts impose ridiculous limits like 50MG of space, and you should avoid these.

2. Host reliability
Look for specific uptime guarantees - 99.5% uptime or better is acceptable. If a hosting company doesn't mention an uptime guarantee, stay away. Longstanding hosts are likely to be more reliable than new companies.

3. Technical Support
You will need phone and email support, and you may be in a different time zone from the host - so you need 24/7 access to a human being at the hosting company. In particular, make sure they offer support at weekends. Don't laugh, some web hosting companies lock up and all staff leave the building on Fridays at 5pm.

4. Scripts and access
As your hosting needs grow, you'll need FTP, PHP, cgi-bin access, telnet, SSH and other features. If you are planning a business site of some sort, or ecommerce, then you will definitely need them at some point. Make sure there are no limiting restrictions on features like this, and on script installation.

5. Multi-site hosting
This used to be rare, but now most of the best web hosting companies have this option. If you are planning more than one site, check your host lets you set them all up under one account.

6. Price
Competition has driven down prices so far that you can get perfectly good and reliable hosting for $10 a month or less. But don't make a decision about a web hosting company purely on the basis of what it will cost you every month. Whatever you pay, the cost of the hosting is likely to be trivial compared with the cost of the time you spend creating, maintaining and promoting your new site.