How do I pick a web host?
Choosing a web host can be one of the most important things you do to make your website a success. This is because your web hosting provider is the company that makes sure your site is always up and running and available to all of your visitors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The number of options available for different web hosting plans can be a bit overwhelming but here are a few tips that are the most important to look for in a web hosting company.

Technical support
No matter how savvy you are with web sites or how good your web hosting company is, you will have technical issues sooner or later. It is critical that your web hosting provider have responsive and helpful support services. Check reviews online to see what others experiences have been with a hosting company before making your decision.

Price Most hosting providers offer plans that charge you for monthly access. There are many hosting companies that advertise free hosting or low cost one time fees. Make sure to read the fine print very carefully because in many cases, you will either have to have advertising on your website or will be required to prepay for several months or years in advance to get those extra low rates. That can be a great way to save money in the long run but make sure you know what the terms are before purchasing.

Email hosting
If you want email addresses that use your domain name, you should check with your hosting provider to see if they offer additional email hosting and how many email accounts they offer per hosting plan. Most of the hosting providers that offer email hosting, will provide online web-mail tools to check your mail through your browser as well.

Bandwidth Bandwidth is the amount of web content that your site serves up when browsers visit your site. This content is made of up of lots of blocks of data also called “traffic”. The more traffic you have to your website, the more bandwidth your site uses to serve your web pages to those visitors. Check with your hosting provider to see how much bandwidth your site will be allotted and depending on how many visitors you expect, make sure you have enough to serve those visitors because bandwidth overage charges can be expensive.

Disk space
This is the amount of space your website takes up on the web server that is hosting your content. If you have lots of images, pictures, or video, you will need to make sure your hosting plan offers enough disk space to store all of this content on your web server. Add up all the entire size of your website in Megabytes and make sure it is less than the size of your disk space allotted in your web hosting plan.

There are lots of web hosting providers to choose from. Make sure to check reviews online before making a decision. Send an email to the hosting provider you are interested in working with and see how long it takes them to respond to your question. This will give you a good idea of the kind of support you will receive. You want a hosting provider that you can rely on and not have to worry about so do your homework before making a choice.