One of the most important aspects of putting together a killer website is finding the right kind of web hosting service to get your site published on the Internet. It can seem pretty overwhelming to try and choose one service when there seem to be billions online to choose from. If you’re new to owning a website you maybe wondering what you need to look for in a good web hosting service. Here’s a top 10 list of what you need to look for when choosing a service provider to host your site.

10. Customer Service

Service is an extremely important aspect to consider when finding a good Web hosting service. If you have any familiarity with any type of technology you are well aware that there are occasional hiccups and problems that pop up unexpectedly. When this occurs you need to be able to contact the Webhost company and get immediate troubleshooting help. You will want to connect with a service that offers 24 hour a day, seven days a week support. Make sure the company has a phone number and email address to contact them with, as well as a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page. Some companies have a forum where people can post questions and get answers as well.

9. Company Reliability

Reliability is an important quality to look for in any company, but especially a company that you are going to be paying to host your website. You should try and find a host that has some backup servers just in case the unexpected happens and the main servers go down. If your website is how you make money then you can’t afford for your site to be down, so this is very important.

8. Email

If you run your own business online, your website is how you make your money. You will need to be able to get in contact with your customers when they place orders or when problems pop up. This is why you need to make sure that part of the package you purchase from a Webhost has emails that contains the domain name of your website.

7. Shopping Cart or SSL

Buying items online these days can be pretty risky without a secure server. Your website should have a secured server so your customers can enter in their private information without worrying about having their credit card numbers or other information stolen and used without their permission.

6. Good Control Panel

Some web hosting service provider offer you a little hands on experience in managing a website by allowing you to have a control panel that will allow you to add, delete, or change email addresses and other content that is up on your site. This is definitely the type of service you want, as it can be a huge headache having to call tech support just to change a password or delete an email account.

5. Pricing

The price you have to pay a Webhost company will play a huge part in whether or not you decide to use that company’s services. It’s important that you take into consideration that you do end up getting what you pay for. So while price is an important factor keep in mind that cheaper web hosting services may not be able to meet the needs you have for your website.

4. Available Disk Space

There are a lot of scams being run online with service providers offering potential customers 500 MB of space for a certain price. Technically most websites are run using only 10 MB, which means you will probably never even use all that extra space. That means you actually loose money in this deal.

3. Speed

How fast your webpage actually loads will determine how successful your site will be. If a page doesn’t usually load up within a few seconds people will just close out the window and move on. It’s true, we humans are an impatient bunch, but what choice do you have? The speed in which your site loads depends largely on the type of servers the company uses.

2. Server Software

The type of software being used by the Webhost is very important. There are two main types of software, Unix and Windows NT. Some companies will only offer you one of these options, while others will offer you more. It’s best to find out which ones the company has before choosing them.

1. Connection to the Internet

This is probably the most important deciding factor in determining which company you should go with. There are a lot of different connection types that companies are offering these days. You will preferably want a company that offers a T3 connection as this allows for a lot more data to be transferred at a much faster speed.

1. Advertising

   Most free web hosts impose advertising on your website. This is done to cover the costs of providing your site the free web space and associated services. Some hosts require you to place a banner on your pages, others display a window that pops up everytime a page on your site loads, while still others impose an advertising frame on your site. There is really no hard and fast rule which is to be preferred: some people hate a pop-up window, other webmasters dislike having to stuff banner codes onto their pages, and many people cannot stand an advertising frame (which may cause problems when you submit your website to search engines). Whichever method is used, check that you're comfortable with the method. Note that free web hosts without forced advertisements aren't necessarily good news. Without a viable means to recover the costs of running their server, many of them close with alarming frequency.

2. Amount of web space

   Does it have enough space for your needs? If you envisage that you will expand your site eventually, you might want to cater for future expansion. Most sites use less than 5MB of web space. Indeed, at one time, one of my other web sites, thefreecountry.com, used less than 5MB of space although it had about 150 pages on the site. Your needs will vary, depending on how many pictures your pages use, whether you need sound files, video clips, etc.

3. FTP access

   Some free hosting providers only allow you to design your page with their online builder. While this is useful for beginners, do you have the option to expand later when you become experienced and their online page builder does not have the facility you need? FTP access, or at the very least, the ability to upload your pages by email or browser, is needed. Personally, I feel FTP access is mandatory, except for the most trivial site.

4. File type and size limitations

   Watch out for these. Some free hosts impose a maximum size on each of the files you upload (including one with a low of 200KB). Other sites restrict the file types you can upload to HTML and GIF/JPG files. If your needs are different, eg, if you want to distribute your own programs on your pages, you will have to look elsewhere.

5. Reliability and speed of access

   This is extremely important. A site that is frequently down will lose a lot of visitors. If someone finds your site on the search engine, and he tries to access it but find that it is down, he'll simply go down the list to find another site. Slow access is also very frustrating for visitors (and for you too, when you upload your site). How do you know if a host is reliable or fast? If you can't get feedback from anyone, one way is to try it out yourself over a period of time, both during peak as well as non-peak hours. After all, it is free, so you can always experiment with it.

6. CGI-BIN access / PHP

   This is not particularly crucial nowadays for a free web host, since there are so many free CGI hosting services available that provide counters, search engines, forms, polls, mailing lists, etc, without requiring you to dabble with Perl or PHP scripts. However if you really want to do it yourself, with the minimum of advertising banners from these free providers, you will need either PHP or CGI-BIN access. Note that it is not enough to know they provide PHP or CGI-BIN access: you need to know the kind of environment your scripts run under: is it so restrictive that they are of no earthly use? For PHP scripts, does your web host allow you to use the mail() function? For Perl CGI scripts, do you have access to sendmail or its workalike?

7. Bandwidth allotment

   Nowadays, many free web hosts impose a limit on the amount of traffic your website can use per day and per month. This means that if the pages (and graphic images) on your site is loaded by visitors beyond a certain number of times per day (or per month), the web host will disable your web site (or perhaps send you a bill). It is difficult to recommend a specific minimum amount of bandwidth, since it depends on how you design your site, your target audience, and the number of visitors you're able to attract to your site. In general, 100MB traffic per month is too little for anything other than your personal home page and 1-3GB traffic per month is usually adequate for a simple site just starting out. Your mileage, however, will vary.