How To Choose A Web Host For Your Internet Home Business

Selecting a host is an important part of your business.For commercial sites, free hosting is a waste of time. Your users are exposed to annoying pop-up advertisements every time they come to your page and you don’t even get a real business URL. No ones going to remember your web address if they have to type something like SomeFreeHosting.com/some_site.The best method is to choose a cheaper host at the beginning and move up as your business grows.Here are some of the things you should look for when choosing a web host.Uptime and speed: A web host should be reliable, it should be fast and it should guarantee its uptime i.e. the time when your site is functional and available for access to your visitors. Look for a minimum uptime of 99.5% or higher.Bandwidth: Bandwidth refers to the bytes of data transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site. Look for the exact amount you will get per month with your package. It is a always a good move to stay away from the hosts which offer you unlimited bandwidth because that is surely an unfeasible claim. Your host has to pay for the bandwidth usage and unlimited bandwidth is surely a false claim.To give you an idea most new sites that that do not offer heavy downloads would require between 1-3GB of bandwidth per month. However your traffic requirements will grow over time so it is wise to choose a wide margin.Disk space: Again if you are not planning to store heavy files, you will hardly require beyond 5-10 MB though most of the good hosts offer you space much more than that. Do not go for “Unlimited Space” calls. However keep in mind the future. You may like to expand. But consideration of the space should not be a primary factor.Technical support: Your host should provide you with technical support round the clock including weekends. You can check them by mailing on weekends and find how long do they take to respond. Apart from speed they should be able to provide you competent support. I would always prefer a host that also offers live support and phone support apart from email support.Scripts: When you develop a website, you will need FTP, PHP, Perl, CGI-BIN access, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH crontabs etc. Make sure that your host provides all of these features in the package. Check to see if these facilities are provided. Your host should have listed these in the features of the package.SSL (secure server), MySQL, Shopping Cart are needed for a business website. If your host does not provide you these in the package, it is not worth joining.Moreover you should also have features like Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding so that you can have an email address on your domainControl Panel: This is the interface which allows you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account. These are common maintenance chores that every webmaster performs on a regular basis.Additional Domains/Subdoamins: You should look for these options if you plan to host more than one website or are likely to do in near future. I had to change my host as previous one would not allow hosting of additional domains.Server Type: In comparison to Windows Uniix based servers are cheaper, more stable and feature-laden. However for asp script, a Windows based server is more desirable.Fee Factor: This obviously is very important. There are hosts which would charge you $25 per month and are provide you restricted features whereas better services are offered by others at $6 per month.A costlier host need not be better and if the features you desire are provided by a reliable cheaper host then it is wise to choose the later.I would advise you not to go for annual payment plan in the beginning. Try the host with monthly plans first and when sure of worthiness and reliability, move to annual plans because annual plans allow you to save money.If you happen to buy from a reseller, do investigate the actual company he represents. Resellers sometime offer even a better bargain than their company.Terms and Conditions: Always read the terms and conditions. There may be special restrictions on what you can or cannot have on your site. Just find out.