I think there is a lot of question regarding webhosting in forums because people are not sure if they should commit one year with one webhosting, and some people would end up purchasing a cheap webhosting which does not fit into their needs. Most webhosting company provide money back guarantee and some have monthly plan, try them out before your decide to go with the particuliar company.

Local or Overseas Server Location
This is one of the priority I search for a webshosting company although some company have servers in both local datacenters and US datacenters. My rule of thumb is that if you are serving a local visitor, go ahead with Local services because you will get phone support and it is usually faster to load local website. When you are serving a visitor from the whole world, I would suggest that the server located in United States or Europe because you could target more International reader who reads in English.

Webhosting Company Review
Although some of the reviews on the Internet are sometimes bias and maybe submited by the webhosting company themselves or their competitors, there are some real ones. I tend to search for keyword like “Dreamhost Review” on google or “Hosted by Dreamhost” (you could subsitute Dreamhost with other hosting company). I use the keyword Hosted by Company because I would like to know the speed of the website is loading as I do not want to take hours to upload my website to the webhosting company.

Another best place to look for review is from forums, as some of them will provide pretty honest reply and if you are lucky, you could get some promotional offer for the particuliar webhosting you need.

Price
Price does reflects on the services you get, therefore it is best to go for what you can afford. Share hosting level it could vary from USD10.00/year to USD15.99/month or more. Personally, I experience arguing with someone about price but I would recommend paying a little more because Webhosting is like a shop/office rental for your business, and how much do you generally pay for a shop rental? 100 times more?

Type of Webhosting
You could choose from shared hosting, VPS hosting and Dedicated Server.

  • Shared Hosting - The cheapest, and it is suitable for bloggers, personal website, and small to medium business website. You could generally start your e-commerce or forum using shared hosting, and when demand for your server resources increase, you can do an upgrade. Generally you share them with 100 to 500 different users depending on the hosting policy.
  • VPS Hosting - Virtual Private Server is basically splitting a server with a fix amount of users, therefore you would at least get a fix amount of resources. This is the solution to upgrading from Shared Hosting to a Dedicated hosting because of price. Usually forums and high traffic website would require at least a VPS hosting.
  • Dedicated Hosting - Dedicated comes managed and unmanage. Managed hosting is where the hosting company assign technical staff to run routine maintainance and provide support. Unmanage Dedicated Hosting does not mean that your server is setup and left there as it is, but support is minimal and if you require technical assiatant, you may end up paying extra.
  • Reseller Hosting - This is actually an account which enables you to sell other share hosting plan. You will be given some resources which you could split them up and sell them to your client. This is very suitable for web design company as they could provide hosting service and get recurring income.

Webhosting Operating System
Basically you could choose between linux and windows. This is quite easy to choose because it will depend on what you plan to install on your hosting server. If you plan to have a wordpress blog, you know that you definately be choosing a linux hosting plan. Plain HTML website will work well in both server, but you may want to think of future expansion like a forum for your client or a blogging platform.

Popularity: 18% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure subscribe to my RSS feed! or your could read this blog via Email Subscription.