What to look at before you buy web hosting

Choosing a web host is a tricky business, there are so many companies out there all offering you incredible packages, but do you really know what it is they are offering you?

Hosting is a cutthroat business; web hosts are desperate for new customers and will do just about anything to get you onboard. These will include things like offering you a free domain name, bandwidth and disk space upgrades or special deals on shopping carts.

Don’t get sucked in by these deals, make sure that you do your research before you commit to a company. In this article I will show you exactly what to look for before you sign up with a web host.

1. The Price

Most shared hosting packages from the “big” companies will come priced at around $3 - $12 per month. Whilst this may seem very cheap make sure that you read the small print, you will often find that to get the cheapest price you need to sign up to a long contract, usually 2 years. If you want to sign up for a short-term contract then the host may charge you a “set-up fee” or a higher monthly rate. You will notice that I made a point of highlighting the contract lengths and set-up fee's in my recent Hostmonster review. Make sure you know exactly how much everything is going to cost before you sign up with anyone.

2. The Disk Space and Bandwidth

Don’t be fooled by hosts that claim to give you “unlimited” disk space and “unlimited” bandwidth – there is no such thing! It’s impossible to find a hard drive that doesn’t fill up, the same goes for bandwidth, any host that sells you an unlimited service should be treated with great caution. They are probably overselling their servers in the hope that you don’t use up a lot of disk space or bandwidth.

The same goes for the “monster” hosting packages; by this I mean the packages that offer you a ridiculous amount of disk space and bandwidth for a low monthly fee. You will usually find that as soon as you get anywhere near the disk space or bandwidth limits you will be forced to upgrade to a dedicated server or VPS package. A shared hosting package simply can’t run with one customer using up so many resources.

3. The Support

This is the most important part of the process, you can have the best hosting deal in the world but if the support is terrible then it is worthless. No matter how tech-savvy you are, chances are that you will, at some point need to contact the technical support team.

Before you sign up with any web host, send them a technical support question and phone their helpdesk. Ask them a general hosting question and then wait for the reply. If you receive a reply within a timely fashion then it’s obviously a good sign, if however you are left waiting for days then you should probably avoid the host!

Dan Thompson is a veteran website designer and has used numerous webhosts in his time. Dan specialises in writing web host reviews, his latest article is a Hostmonster Review. You can view Dan's latest web hosting review at http://www.hostmonster-the-review.com

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