There are several things that should be taken into consideration when you are looking at various web hosting services. In this short article, we take a quick, but important look at some of the most basic factors to consider.

First of all, you must decide if you will use a free hosting service or if you will use a web hosting company that charges a hosting fee. Essentially, a free web hosting solution is often a bad idea, since it usually comes with mandatory advertising on your site, which you cannot control (this is how they make money doing it while offering the “service” for free.) Also, free hosting is often unreliable and prone to hacking or downtime.

Assuming you are going to use a commercial web hosting company, there are several points that should be considered and compared among the different providers:

Web access, uptime and reliability

This is a no brainer. You want to use a company that has a history of reliable web access with very little downtime.

High bandwidth

Bandwidth is simply the amount of data that is transferred from your site to a visitor. Bandwidth costs money, and you should have a good understanding of how much bandwidth you will get with their service. Depending on the amount of visitors and the amount of data on your website, you may need to increase the amount of bandwidth in order to avoid being charged for additional bandwidth fees by your web hosting provider.

Disk space

Many providers attempt to sell to potential clients by pushing Unlimited disk space. The fact is, most sites will use less space than the company will try to sell. It is therefore wise to have a rough estimate of what type of space your site will require and shop around accordingly. Read the fine print, and understand that unlimited is not always really unlimited.

Customer service and technical support

There are certainly other things to take into consideration when comparing a hosting company such as email forwarding, SSL, subdomains, and other useful features. Customer service is absolutely paramount for a good provider. While running your website, you will probably encounter various technical issues, and at times you may need your host to assist you with various issues that come up. A good company will provide quick, knowledgeable, and results oriented service to their clients. As it is the case with many other things, you typically get what you pay for!