With so many web hosts to choose from on the Internet. One of the most common questions you will have is.. “How do I choose a good web host?” There are many things that you have to consider when choosing a web host. And notice that it says “a Good” web host in the title, and not “just ANY” web host. The worst thing you want to do is just jump on to Google impulsively, type in “web host provider” and pick the first one you see. Well you can, but then you’ll probably end up getting a new one later anyways. 
When choosing a web host, there are 4 main things that you must determine before you know if that potential candidate is a good one or not.
- Reliability – This is by far the most important and completely overrides and outweighs the price side of things. You want to select a host that has a 99.99% up-time guarantee. Just imagine after spending hours and hours getting your website together and launched, things are going well and you’re gaining momentum driving a ton of traffic (and eeek if it was paid traffic) .. then all of a sudden, you get a 503 server not found error when you try to load up your website on a browser. And you find out this is because the Web host that you are using and PAYING FOR, all of a sudden shut down for whatever reasons they are having. This would drive you nuts! Not only will you lose traffic that you’ve paid and worked for, this could also potentially damage your reputation as a website if you have users online at the moment or users attempting to access your site during that down time. No one likes going to a page only to see a bunch of errors pop up. A reliable web host is key. Choose one that has an outstanding reputation and plenty of good client testimonials.
- Customer Support – This is also another big one, that’s why it is listed at #2. When you have a website up, there will inevitably be times when you need to have your questions answered or where you will need help in regards to solving a problem related to the web host. How quickly do they respond to support tickets? Are they rude or painful to deal with? Are they even helpful? There are some hosts that don’t even respond for weeks, avoid these ones at all costs. How do you find these things out? Again, researching client testimonials can take a few extra minutes but save you a tremendous amount of pain later on. There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to communicate with your hosting provider when there is an issue.
- Interface/features – If you have a great web host provider but don’t have any good features and an easy to navigate interface, then you might find yourself getting a bit overwhelmed when you have to setup the technical side of things manually. Good thing though, most web hosts will have control panels such as cPanel. Direct admin, Plesk, webmin etc. cPanel is by for most popular on the web and allows you to do things such as setup your email accounts, add domains/subdomains, manage files, create FTP logins. Etc etc. Basically anything that you need to do in order to have your website up and operating smoothly.
- Price – Finally we get to price. There are so many web hosts available on the Internet; there are hosts fit for any budget, big or small. With all this selection it naturally creates tremendous competition thus lowering the prices for the end consumer. You can find web hosts that will host your site for as little as $3.50 a month (possibly even lower). A couple that I recommend are www.hostgator.com and www.cirtexhosting.com (which I use personally).
Now depending on the amount of traffic you are getting, you will probably want to go with 1 of the following types of server options.
Shared server – This is when you are sharing the server with a bunch of other websites. This will probably be the best option for you when you are starting out because it is the lowest price, and you won’t be using that much server power at the beginning, at least initially anyways.
Dedicated Server – This is when you’ve gotten enough traffic to the point where you are slowing down the rest of the shared server and now you need a completely dedicated server. This is a good milestone to be at and will speed up your websites loading times considerably. Naturally price will also be raised.
Colocated server – This is when you have your own server hardware and no longer need to rent. You can take your server, get it all configured and bring it into your web hosts data center. In most cases this would be a lot cheaper than renting servers for the long term. However you must consider the costs of actually purchasing server hardware, because its not cheap like renting a shared server.
A good place to find out about all things web hosting related is: http://www.webhostingtalk.com