Ina’s Dollars From Home Blog

Now that you know you need a web hosting company to host your website, the next step will be to find out what services and features they present. Finding a reliable web hosting company is key to ensure steady, trustworthy hosting for your legitimate online business. Going cheap is not the answer but you don’t have to pay and arm and a leg either.

What should you look for in a reliable web hosting company?

1. Up-time: You want your website to be running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Actually, no web host can really guarantee 100% up-time. Search for a web host that offers 99.9%.

2. Customer Support: A good web host company will reply quickly to your email requests or telephone calls and deal with any problems you may have in a timely manner.The best companies will offer 24/7 tech support.

3. No Setup Fees: Many web hosts dispense with setup fees. And so they should. Setting up a website account is a quick and straightforward process.

4. Storage Space: Anything between 500 and 1,000 megabytes should be enough for the needs of most business websites. It is better to have too much space than too little, but do not be tricked into buying more space than you will ever use.

5. Bandwidth: For web hosting purposes, this is a measure of how much data is downloaded from the site by your visitors over the course of a month. If you have 25GB of bandwidth for your hosting account, that is how much data you will be able to transfer to visitors’ browsers during any given month. Allow yourself a generous amount of bandwidth, especially if you plan to upload large files such as high quality images to your site.

6. Pop e-mail accounts: You may want to set up extra email accounts in the future, so for a web host that allows you to run 10 or more pop email accounts.

7. CGI-BIN: CGI programs allow you to run interactive programs on your website to enhance your visitors’ experience, things like guest books, message boards, mailing lists and so on. Without CGI-BIN you will not be able to host those programs on your website.

8. PHP and PERL: These programming scripts will allow you easily to set up databases.

9. Run Cron Events: Certain programs require cron events to be set up in order to run properly so make sure this feature is included in your hosting package.

10. FTP Upload: Determine that the web host offers anonymous FTP support via a dedicated FTP server.

11. Site Stats: Does the web host offer you some way of assessing the traffic to your website?

When looking for the best, reliable web hosting company for your legitimate online business, don’t just take the company’s word about its services. Do some research on Google to see if you can find any positive or negative feedback. While not all complaints are valid, a consistently bad company will certainly attract a lot of negative comment and a consistently good one may receive a little praise.

Now that you have a checklist of features you want your web host  to offer, you should be well equipped to find a reliable web hosting company that fits your pocket and demands.