There are many companies that offer a web hosting service and choosing the right one for you can be very time-consuming and confusing. Your host is the one who is responsible for your website being online and being accessed by visitors so you need to make the right decision.

To make the decision a little easier I have listed below the main points that you need to consider.

Site Uptime

Look at the uptime the hosting company is guaranteeing.  If it is under 99% move on and look for another one.   You need your website to be up and online as much as possible. Downtime results in less traffic to your site which in turn leads to fewer enquiries.

Server Load Time

Your site needs to load as quickly as possible otherwise visitors will leave. 

Features

Features are a very important consideration.  Some companies offer loads and loads of features; more features than you’ll ever even think of using.  Have a look through all the features and decide whether you really need them. One feature that you must make sure is offered is regular backups.

Pricing

Decide what features are important to you and make sure the companies you are evaluating offer what you need.  Then have a look at their pricing. Just be wary of the cheapest deal. It may be the most appealing but the cheap hosting may just be for the first year and from the second year onwards you may be charged very highly. Sometimes, the companies with fees right in the middle work out best.

Shared or dedicated?

Shared hosting  is the most common type of service.  It simply means multiple websites hosted on the same server.

An advantage of this service is that it is available at cheaper rates being the most common type. However, the main disadvantage is that, since your site is sharing resources with many other sites, there may be a slow server response time. Also, shared hosting can mean limited disk space and bandwidth (this is measure of maximum data that can be transferred in a given time, usually measured in seconds).

The other main option is to have your own dedicated server which will provide you with a space that’s completely yours, i.e. only your sites are there and nothing else.  There would be no bandwidth issues as there would be no other sites possibly delaying the server response time.

The main disadvantage though is that this is a fairly costly option.