Criteria of Choosing an Ideal Web Hosting Company

Before we talk about what it takes to be a cheap and good quality web host, let’s get to the fundamental first.

What is a Web Host?
A web host is a service provider that places your web site on a computer which is connected to the internet. The term for this ‘computer’ is called a server.

Web Hosting

A web hosting provider will typically have a fast connection to the Internet and they may host thousands of web sites on many servers. The web host essentially rents out space to you so that you can get your website up on the world wide web.

With a well-managed web host, you can free yourself from worrying the up-keep of complicated server technology and proper technical maintenance. That’s the whole purpose of the web hosting companies. You should leave the technical work to web hosting professional while you focus on your own internet business.

Let’s begin...
Feature Offered
The features that web hosting companies are offering are getting quite standard nowadays.
The followings are some of the common features you'll see in most web hosting plans:

Control Panel Control Panel is an interface where you can access your site on the web server, allowing you to set-up and subsequently update and customize your web site. Though cPanel is by far the most popular control panel, some hosting providers customize their own so that they can up-grade and expand it at will. Diskspace A vast majority of sites that don't have tons of graphics, sound and video clips or downloadable files easily fit in 50 MB of disk space. You should always leave yourself some room for growth or check if the host has a bigger plan in case you need to upgrade. Bandwidth Bandwidth is the amount of data transmitted or received through a unit of time. In web hosting, bandwidth is consumed when visitors make requests for files on your web site and download them to their personal computers. Email Account With POP3 email accounts you can check email from Outlook, Netscape Mail, Eudora or any other Email software. Scripting language As all our top 10 listings are using Unix and Linux platform, php, perl and CGI are the languages we are talking about here. It is best to choose a host that supports the latest version to maximize the latest web technologies for the fee that you pay. Database If your web site is going to store a lot of data that should be dynamically accessible (like user accounts, stock prices, maps, Interactive news, message boards and forum etc.), you'll need to look for an account that offers a database. MySQL is a powerful and most popular database program that runs on the Linux operation system. It is able to handle million of entries all at once. Its flexibility and speed allow you to also store logs and pictures. MySQL is designed to scale well under heavy traffic conditions and is ideal for database-intensive or e-commerce-enabled Web sites.

Customer Service/Support

No matter if you are an expert or a novice in web hosting, you need a web host with good customer support system. What is the criteria of an excellent customer support? Let us explain.

How big is the knowledge base? This is particularly important for those who want to search for quick answer without seeking direct assistance from customer support staff. Due to the huge database, normally it’s searchable. Some web hosting providers will even make your life easier by making a video tutorial guiding you step by step in setting up your new account. Very useful for beginner.
Responsive customer service staff. If you are too lazy to find the answer out of a big pool of database, get the direct answer from someone who knows it. Direct customer support comes in a few forms. a. Email support b. Phone support: Normally, sales and technical support uses separate phone line. A good phone support staff knows what your problem is and answers with relevance. c.Web Host like Lunarpages and Globat even have live chat support. However, it’s not how many support channels that are available but how responsive it is of the staff. You can find out the hosting reviews and ratings [http://www.top10cheapwebhosting.com/services/cheap-web-hosting-criteria.php] of each of our Top 10 Cheap Web Host.

Price to Disk Space / Price to Bandwidth Ratio

Are you paying too much for your Web Hosting Plan?

Having done the research on hundreds of web hosting companies, in general, we’ve come to this conclusion: the more disk space and bandwidth you are getting, the more expensive is the monthly price.

To help you understand which price is competitive enough for you to take up the offer, we have categorized 5 different price range. For each price range, a score of maximum of 10 is assigned. To understand the concept behind this, please refer to the details here. [http://www.top10cheapwebhosting.com/services/cheap-web-hosting.php]

Popularity
A web host might have the best feature offered, unbeatable customer support and reliability in place but without an effective marketing plan, it will go bust too. Let’s face it. If a web hosting provider does not have sufficient members and steady growth of new members, it’s very difficult to survive in this highly competitive industry.

We judge the popularity of a particular web hosting provider by looking at the number of awards won, the reviews of other websites and the Alexa traffic ranking.

All the hosting providers listed on our Top 10 Cheap Web Hosting Directory are among the top 40,000 most visited websites in the world.

Reliability, Speed and Uptime Guarantee

Nothing can hurt you more than this: your visitors come to your web site only to find that it’s not accessible. You lose credibility and possibly even a sale. If your web host does not guarantee at least a 99% uptime, leave the web host now!

To ensure maximum uptime, installation of redundant back-up systems is essential. Each web host has their own management systems to minimize downtime. "Redundant" means that if any of the Internet connections get interrupted, the alternate Internet connection will take over.

We use Alertra software to monitor the uptime of each of our top 10 web hosts.

As for speed, even though routing, web server set up and local area networks play a part in determining the speed of a site, the main concern of how fast your site is depends very much on the types of network connections.

Many hosting providers still connect to the Internet through T1, or T3 connections. This is not the case for our top 10 hosts- they are using OC (Optical Carrier) lines.

A T1 line will offer data transfer rate of 1.5 Mbps (megabits per second), while a T3 line can supply data transfer rates of 43Mbps. OC-1 refers to a circuit that transmits 51.85Mbps. Higher levels are multiples of that speed. Ultra-High Speed OC3 and OC12 lines offers 155Mbps and 622Mbps respectively. Some hosting providers have connections to major internet backbones at the speed of OC48 (2488Mbps) and OC96 (4976Mbps).

Criteria of Choosing an Ideal Web Hosting Company

Web Hosting Plan - Recommended 5 Criteria

Web hosting is an important factor when you decide to create a web site whether for personal or business reasons. A web host is the service that provides you with the server space where your web site information is housed for the world wide web. There are numerous web hosting providers on the market now but not all are created equal. A relationship is formed between you and the web host which is your web hosting plan. Since you will be paying for this service you want to be certain that the service provides you with all you'll need without charging you lots of extra fees as your site grows and develops. Basically you want to make sure the relationship is going to be beneficial not only for the web host but for you as well. As the relationship continues and evolves you want to make sure that your needs aren't stifled. Below are 5 important criteria that you need to be aware of before deciding on a service.

1 - Give Me Some Space

Web Hosting

Your web hosting plan will allow you only a specific amount of space on their server. Make certain that you are aware of the limits so that you can determine if this relationship will be fruitful for you down the road, as your space requirements will probably grow.

Not only is disk space important but also bandwidth. If your site has audio or video features, bandwidth must be taken into consideration so that additional fees won't be acquired.

2 - Don't Fence Me In

Be sure that the provider allows you to have multiple domains. This is very important for business that is focused on branding. This could mean several different domains that all lead to the same site or multiple sites and domains for different ventures. It's inconvenient to go to a different web host for each of your domains. One stop shopping keeps life simpler.

Although it is much simpler to use one web host for several domains, many businesses prefer to diversify their web hosting so if a server is down their business won't be as adversely effected. Regardless be sure to use a web host that allows multiple domains whether you use them or not.

3 - No Extra Fees Please

There was a time when the hosting provider would charge you an upfront fee. Thanks to competition those days are gone. So don't fall victim to that one. Also as previously mentioned you want to be sure you understand the disk space and bandwidth you are allotted so there are no surprise charges.

4 - What's In It For Me?

As the internet and web development evolve, more and more features that make the whole process better as in easier and more effective are available. Email accounts, FTP accounts and databases are just a few features that should be easily accessible for you.

Many software systems that you may utilize for your site's development such as Joomla require modules. Be sure the modules are available free of charge.

5 - Give Me A Hand Here?

When you start creating your own website then there will inevitably be questions that arise. It is frustrating when there's no one available to answer your questions or steer you in the right direction. Although it may be very difficult to find a provider that will answer your calls. So be sure to find one that will email or IM with you at the very least.

Web Hosting Plan - Recommended 5 Criteria