So you are new to being a webmaster, and have a site built and ready to go. All you need now is hosting! But you don’t really know what you should be doing to find the perfect company. Here are four steps to follow in selecting a hosting company.

Step 1. Only read up on the hosting plans that suit your needs. There is no reason to look at companies that cannot accommodate your website needs. If you log onto a site and see that a company is offering too many complicated features, you may want to skip to the next one. You will save a lot of valuable time.

Step 2. Make sure you review hosting plans in detail. There are so many different web hosting companies. Start by looking for user submitted testimonials at websites such as WebHostingJury.com. Make a categorized list of the companies that offer plans that fit your needs and then weed out the companies that have a bad track record. Then, if you still feel that you haven’t found a proper web host, you can continue looking for other companies.

Step 3. Ask for quotes from these companies. If you like what you see on a web hosting company’s website then call them on the phone and explain to them exactly what you need and they will be more than happy to provide you with a quote. After you get all the quotes you can read them over and compare all the quotes together. If they don’t have a phone number, I strongly suggest you stay away from them! You don’t want to get stuck with a company that may vanish in a week.

Step 4. Use common sense. There are four things that are important to look for in a good hosting company. Price, Reliability, Uptime, and Customer Support. If any company is lacking in any of these three areas, look again.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Guides, Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.