Indeed, choosing the right web hosting service for your website is not an easy task especially when there are thousands of web hosting providers all offering almost identical web hosting packages. Therefore, it is important to know few major considerations even before you start your web hosting search. Below are three major criteria for web host seeker:

Web hosting features requirement

This is probably the most important consideration to start finding a host for your site. You need to decide the technical requirements for your website, this including:

a) Server platform and hardware requirements
If you plan to set up a website that uses programming environments such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic scripts, Cold Fusion or Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL database, in this case, you will need to find a web hosting service that supports Windows platform such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers.

Likewise, if you plan to use programming languages such as Perl, CGI, SSI, PHP or mySQL database, then any web hosting plans that support Unix/Linux platform should be sufficient to meet your hosting requirements. Once you have these server platform and hardware requirements in mind, you can decide the best web hosting plans for your need. For more information, you can read “How to select a web server and server platform?”

b) Disk space & Bandwidth requirement
Here is another technical requirement that you need to consider before selecting a web hosting plan, i.e. disk space and bandwidth. If you intend to publish a website that does not have a lot of contents (meaning, web pages), then the disk space requirement may not be a big concern to you. In general, a disk space with 200MB to 500MB should be enough to meet your hosting requirement. In contrast, if you plan to host a website with enormous amount of graphic pictures, mp3 or video files, then you should consider a web hosting plan that provide huge disk space, for example, 500 MB to 1,000 MB.

Similarly, the bandwidth requirement will depend on your site traffic estimation. Obviously, a website that expect to attract high traffic will consume the monthly bandwidth allowance very fast. If so, you will need to find one web hosting service that offer huge bandwidth with 40 GB to 100 GB per month. Depending upon your website requirement, choosing a web hosting service that provide sufficient amount of disk space and bandwidth is crucial consideration to prevent paying extra costs in the future should you overuse the monthly disk space and bandwidth allowance.

c) Other hosting features
While the above requirements are utmost important, there are other hosting features that you have to consider too. Can web hosting provider support video clips on your website, if you have? Is the web hosting service compatible with Dreamweaver or FrontPage web authoring tool? Do you plan to set up a virtual store online? Can the host support the e-commerce features without adding extra cost to your monthly payments? On top of that, you may also want to find out the number of email accounts provided, number of FTP accounts, web statistic software (analyze your web traffic), type of control panel supported (manage your web hosting account), database and scripting languages supported and etc.

Reliability and scalability

A first-class web hosting provider offers reliable server uptime and fast Internet connection. You should only choose a web hosting service that guarantee at least 99% server uptime with high-speed Internet backbones using at least OC3 (Optical Carrier) lines (155 Megabits per second) or above instead of T1 or T3 lines. A reliable web hosting provider usually invests heavily on their data center infrastructure with high performance servers, high speed multiple backbones providers with fail-over redundancy, backup power generators and firewall software protection in place to ensure they meet the uptime guarantee specified in the terms of service.

Similarly, you should choose a web hosting service with hardware facilities that designed for scalability, so that they can grow with your business. For example, if you need to increase more disk space, bandwidth or number of mySQL databases, you should be able to upgrade as needed without any problems.

Customer service and support

The last major consideration in choosing a web hosting service is to find a web hosting providers that offers excellent customer service and support. You should always search for a web hosting provider that offers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week technical support that fielded with highly experience technicians, so that any web hosting problems will be resolved within a reasonable amount of time. You may also want to consider to test how responsive is their customer support by sending few inquiry emails to the web hosting provider. In general, any response in less than 24 hours is considered acceptable. It is a sign of poor customer support if they take more than one day to response.

In addition, a web hosting provider with excellent support should also provide multiple support channels, such as toll-free phone support, 24/7 email support, live chat, online knowledgebase, Interactive flash tutorials and FAQ.

Above are few major considerations before you choose your web hosting service. In addition, how long has the web hosting provider in business and the number of customers that they currently have are also a good indication of the quality of their hosting products as well as the stability of the company. Even though cost of the web hosting service is also important but it should not be your major consideration. Because the price of a web hosting service has been declining over the years due to competition, as a result, the price of most of the web hosting services offering quality hosting features has been converging to less than US$10 per month. If you can’t afford less than $10 per month, you probably isn’t in the online business for the long haul. Therefore, price should not be a major deciding factor.

On the other hand, it is more important to ensure the web hosting service that you choose is able to meet your website hosting requirements, guarantee your website is always accessible with satisfying speed, provide scalability to grow and expand your website as well as offer excellent customer supports. Depending on your web hosting requirements, you can take advantage of the site, Cheap Web Hosting Review to find the recommended web hosting services that can match the three major criteria above. Good luck to your search.

Andrew is the owner of Web Hosting Services, a website that provides complete and detail reviews on web hosting services. You can visit his website at:http://www.lowest-price-web-hosting.com/

Compare the best cheap hosting services.

What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website.

Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.

A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to store the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called data center. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.

What are the different types of web hosting?
There are different kinds of web hosting companies out there with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following categories:

Shared Hosting

In shared hosting (also known as virtual web hosting), many websites are sharing the space on the same physical web servers. Depending on the web host, a physical web server can hosts a few hundred to even thousand of different websites at one time. You may wonder if a physical web server is shared by so many websites, will the performance of the web server deteriorate? In fact, web servers are usually equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore it can support up to a certain number of websites without any problem. But when the web server is overloaded and exceeded the reasonable number of websites that it can support, then you will begin to experience a slower response from the web server.

However, a reputable and experience web hosting provider will constantly monitor the performance of the web server and will add new web servers when deem necessary without sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. Since a physical web server is shared (diskspace, computer processing power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web hosting provider can therefore afford to offer a lower hosting price. For the same reason, websites on the shared hosting would have to accept slower server response time. Typically, shared hosting plans start at $5 – $20 per month.

Dedicated Hosting

In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned a specific web server to be used only by one customer. Since a dedicated web server is allocated to only a single customer, the customer has the option to host single/multiple web sites, modify the software configuration, handle greater site traffic and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore, dedicated hosting commands a higher premium and typically starts at $50 per month and can range up to $200 – $500 per month. As a result, dedicated hosting is regularly used by high traffic and extremely important website.

Co-location hosting

In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the web hosting providers and customers only rent the web server during the hosting period. While in co-location hosting, the customer owns the web server hardware and only housed their web server within the web hosting providers secure data center. In this way, the customer has full control over their web server and simultaneously benefit from the 24/7 server monitoring and maintenance provided by the secure data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth and rack space required, typically co-location hosting range from $500 – $1000 per month.

Reseller hosting

In reseller hosting, a web hosting provider offers web server storage to third-party (i.e. reseller) at a discount price, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Typically, resellers are web consultants including web designers, web developers, or system integration company who resell the web hosting as a add-on service to complement their other range of services. Commonly, resellers can receive up to 50 percent discount on the price of a hosting account from the web hosting provider. And resellers are allowed to decide its own pricing structure and even establish its own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web hosting company on the Internet and start selling web hosting plans under its brand).

To the resellers customers, the reseller is the web host provider. In cases when technical problems such as server down and access problem arise, the resellers will have to correspond directly with the actual web host provider. Due to the communication process taken place between customer to reseller and from reseller to actual web host provider and back and forth, undoubtedly problems will take longer time to resolve. Unless you are running your own personal website or non-profit website and willing to take the risks of poor support from the reseller, reseller hosting is generally not a good option.

However, the web hosting market today is filled with resellers that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So, how do you tell between a genuine web hosting provider from a reseller? You dont judge by the availability of toll-free number alone because some web hosting providers even offer their resellers with their own toll-free number for co-branded technical support. When the resellers customer calls the number for technical support, the web host uses the resellers name so the customer thinks that the support is coming from the reseller directly. Likewise, dont be fooled by the professional designed website alone because it is extremely easy to create a professional looked business website nowadays.

In general, resellers can be distinguished from their hosting price and company information. In most cases, a genuine web hosting provider has solid company information such as iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background, offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually do not have solid company background (here is just an example out of thousands out there). Moreover, the hosting price by resellers is generally below $5 per month. So, why settle for resellers when you can find genuine web hosting providers offering superb quality web hosting at the hosting price ranging between $7 – $10.

Therefore, you should not strive to find the cheap web hosting companies without first considering the quality of the service and support provided. Dont expect to find any top-level support if you choose to pay only $2 or $3 per months for your web hosting plan. On the other hand, by paying just slightly more for your hosting plan, you can now discover a list of low cost yet high quality web hosting plans to host your important website. Look at our high quality and cheap web hosting review and recommendation at http://www.lowest-price-web-hosting.com/top5.shtml

Andrew is the owner of Affordable Web Hosting, a website that provide complete and detailed review of cheap web hosting reviews. Visit his website at: http://www.lowest-price-web-hosting.com

Author: Andrew Webb
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

If you are in the process of selecting a web hosting company for your business website, you need protect yourself against the numerous web hosting scams out there.

Be sure to deal only with a reputable hosting service. When you get your website hosted by a well known hosting company, you can be sure of reliable hosting. Web hosting is a highly competitive industry and only companies that offer reliable services will earn top marks from customers and rating agencies. It requires years of consistent effort to form and maintain a strong reputation, so any company that has managed to earn a good reputation and popularity is not likely to risk jeopardizing it by providing poor quality service.

Be sure you own your domain name. Some companies offer hosting service that includes domain registration, but the companies register the domain names in their own names. In such cases you do not really own your domain. You will end up losing your domain if you change your hosting service provider. Not many business owners are aware of such scams. So the next time you get some cheap hosting offers, be sure to check who’s name     the domain will be registered under.

Does the low cost last? Some companies offer cheap unlimited hosting that includes various add-ons for free. Be sure to check whether such offers are just for a limited period or for the entire period for which your website is registered with them. Sometimes, you will get low cost offers just for the first three months, then your credit cards will be billed automatically after the offer period. Remember to read the fine print because most important clauses of the offers are included under fine print.

As simple way to be find cheap, reliable hosting is to read BBB ratings and compare customer reviews of the best cheap hosting services.

Not many business owners pay attention to the security features of their hosting service providers because they are often preoccupied with the cost. In an effort to find the cheapest hosting service provider, other factors are over looked, such as security.

Poor server security can lead to a lot of problems that may potentially be very costly. Your website’s online security can be easily compromised by hackers. Many of us think that we don’t have anything useful for hackers, so we don’t worry about security issues. However, this thinking can put you in a dangerous situation. Intruders hack into a site for various reasons. Some of them hack into a website to steal the sensitive database information, while others try to steal an expensive source code of a website. There are others who hack websites to distribute malicious software and malware. Some hackers make use of other websites to send spam mails. In all these situations you are subjecting your website visitors to serious security risks. You may lose your reputation by such issues and visitors will hesitate to visit your website again. It is not only visitors that will avoid your website, even the search engines will mark your website as malicious. For example, Google alerts users of malicious sites by posting a note on saying, “This site may harm your computer.” When people see such a note, they will not even dare to visit your website. Imagine the potential losses if your website happens to have such a note displayed during holiday season or during the peak sales season for your website or product.

For this reason, you must make sure the hosting service that you choose has reliable system security that will in turn make your websites reliable. You should carefully review their security options. Besides safeguarding the integrity of your website, you have a great responsibility to your website visitors. They should not be penalized for choosing to consider your services or products.

If you come across web hosting service listed on eBay and other places that seems too cheap, be cautious.  Take the time to carefully review them. Sometimes web hosting services try to sell hosting space from servers that are blacklisted by the search engines at unbelievable prices. Though not all of them are poor quality, you must certainly stop a moment to question why it is so cheap. This will save you from lot of unnecessary problems both for yourself and visitors to your website.

Compare reliable, cheap hosting services.

Ever wondered where your website files are? I know they’re on your computer as well as on your hosting server, but where is your web host server? Where are your website files physically? Not that you need to know, but aren’t you curious? Well, a web host map has just been created which shows the physical locations of the most popular US web hosting companies. The data centers of the top 28 web hosts have been plotted on a Google map so that you can see where your website “lives.”

As long as you host your website with one of the companies listed, you will be able to find your web server instantly. See the web host map now.

Not many people realize the importance of having a good quality web hosting service and how it can help increase website traffic. They often try to signup for the cheapest hosting space for their website. However, not many of them realize the fact that if they try to save money by choosing the cheapest web hosting service, they can lose more than what they save through various other ways.

This is not to mean that all cheap hosting services are poor quality hosting. There are a number of good hosting service providers that charge very reasonable rates. The independent reviews at Cheaphostingsites.org will help you find the best hosting companies.

The quality of your hosting service plays a large role in your website traffic. If your website is going to be down often, then visitors who want to access your website will not be able to. Everyone knows how difficult it is to drive traffic to their websites. When you finally manage to drive traffic after spending a lot of money on your website’s SEO and PPC, then all your efforts will be wasted. You will lose those visitors to your competitors that have cheap reliable hosting.

Besides reducing your traffic, there is another disadvantage as well. Search engines send their bots to crawl websites regularly to see whether there are any updates in the websites for indexing purposes. If your website should is down when the bots visit your website, they cannot crawl your website. This can have a profound affect on your search engine ranking. If this should happen on a regular basis, then they will stop visiting altogether, believing your website to be an inactive site. You will not be able to improve your ranking without getting the search engines to visit your site.

As you can see, the quality of your web hosting service has a tremendous impact on your website’s ranking as well as your traffic. The losses incurred here would be much larger than what you would have possibly saved in signing up with a poor hosting service. You must therefore never compromise on the quality of your hosting service. However, selecting the right hosting service can be highly confusing because all of them claim to offer the best service. Until you try a particular hosting service, you will not know their actual level of reliability. However, you cannot keep switching hosts either, as this can lead to an unstable website as well. When you frequently change your hosting service your website will be offline frequently which again can affect your sales cycle.

With the recession hitting each family hard and subjecting all of us to tremendous financial stress, everyone is looking for extra sources of income. Many people try to make extra money with an internet based businesses, which require them to have a website of their own. Launching a website has its own set of expenses. One needs to pay for the domain name registration, pay for their web design company, and hire an SEO company to promote their business. In addition, we you also have to pay for hosting space. All of these expenses can be substantial when there is no income yet from the business. Therefore, it is important to keep our initial costs and recurring costs low.

One of the areas where we can easily lower costs is our website hosting. If you make a quick search you will find that there are thousands of web hosting companies and each one of them has their own pricing structure. You will notice that the prices vary greatly for the same type of hosting service from one company to another. So if you don’t carefully compare hosting sites, you will be spending a lot of unnecessary money on your hosting each month. You can save a great deal of money by looking for cheap hosting sites.

By cheap web hosting we do not mean poor quality hosting. Stable, reliable hosting is an absolute necessity for the success of your online business. What we need for our website is low cost, dependable hosting. There are many companies that offer cheap reliable hosting while some try to hide behind their own pricing structure. Expensive hosting need not always mean good service and cheap hosting doesn’t necessarily mean poor quality hosting service.

Being new to internet business, it may not be easy to choose the right hosting company. The multitude of available options can be overwhelming. CheapHostingSites.org was designed with this very dilemma in mind. The site lists the best cheap hosting sites along with customer reviews of each. You need not surf the web and visit individual hosting companies and review them one by one. You just need to pick one of the hosting companies from the list of top cheap hosting services.  The features, costs, and customer satisfaction of each web hosting services are displayed to make meaningful comparisons easy. You’ll also find customer ratings which will provide you an indication of the quality of the web hosting service. These cheap hosting reviews have saved a number of website owners from low quality hosts and the ensuing frustration. Do it right from day one and choose a high quality cheap hosting service.

We all want to find cheap hosting for our websites but there is an important factor that is often overlooked when considering a web hosting company to go with; speed. Speed is measure in bandwidth and bandwidth is quite simply what determines how much traffic can flow to your website.

Think of a highway. If you were the only vehicle on that highway you could travel pretty fast right? You could even have some of friends and some strangers on that highway with you and still be able to travel at a decent rate of speed. But if all of the sudden you get downtown L.A. traffic at five in the afternoon, you are at a deadlock. This is how bandwidth works.

If you have a personal website and only expect a few visitors per day, then you are probably safe going with a cheap hosting company that offers little bandwidth. On the other hand, if you plan on your website growing or you have a website that already experiences heavy traffic, then you have o go with a hosing company that offers higher bandwidth. This is not to say that you still can’t get cheap hosting, but it certainly won’t be the cheapest.

Always be sure to ask the web hosting company you are considering how much bandwidth they offer for the price and exactly how many visitors that bandwidth will allow. You built your website for a reason so you have to be sure you are going to be able to get out of it what you want and that can’t happen if you go with a cheap hosing company that just can’t keep up. Let’s face it, you can’t have highway traffic trying to travel down a dirt road and you can’t have tons of web traffic traveling down a tiny bandwidth path either.

If you are like so many that are on a shoestring budget, then chances are you are the creator of your website and thus it is you that must maintain it. If this is true, then you must be sure to go with a web hosting company that is extremely user friendly and not just cheap. While cheap hosting is important, you need to go with a cheap hosing company that offers ways for you to easily create, maintain, and edit your site.

Because you are the creator, you are going to be known as the Webmaster. The first thing you will have to do is to make the website. There are many cheap hosting companies that offer you templates and easy to follow instructions when building your website. This makes it possible for anyone to create a website so long as they have the vision of what the website will entail.

As your business evolves, so too should your website. If you have a web hosing service that is hard to use, it will be hard for you to edit and update your website won’t it? Always make sure that the process of updating your site is not one that you will dread or your success will suffer.

Yes you can create, maintain, and update your own website these days and you can even do it for very cheap. Just make sure that the web hosting company you go with is both cheap and easy to use. There is no need in saving a few bucks, if your site will never get off the ground because the web hosting service you have makes it too complicated to so.

Read user reviews of the best cheap hosting sites.

At first you may start out with a plain vanilla website that offers little more than some of your personal insights and feelings, then before you know it your site is exploding to a full-fledged online furry. We all hope this will happen with our websites and knowing this it is imperative that you go with a web hosing company that not only offers you cheap hosting, but will also have the ability to grow with you as your site grows. Let me explain.

When you first start out, there is simply no reason for you to pay a huge amount of money for web hosting, as there are many cheap hosting options available. However, you should try to go with a web hosting company that will not only offer you cheap hosting straight out of the gates, but that also has other packages that will fit your needs as your website grows.

Think of it as planting a garden and hiring as gardener to tend after it. At first, the garner will be able to keep up with the demand, but over time as your garden blooms, there will be fruits and vegetables to be picked, plants to be trimmed, and other services that need to be done that may not have been needed at first. Either that gardener can keep up with the new demands or you have to go with someone else. Web hosting is much the same.

Choosing a cheap hosting service when you first start your website is a great way to save money. But there are many quality cheap hosing services that can offer you more, for more money, should you need it down the road and it is these companies that you should go with when hosting your website. It’s your garden; make sure it will be able to grow.

Read reviews of cheap web hosting sites.