Choosing a good web host is very important as it can make or break the success of your website. For example, if your host is unreliable and you find that your server is often down you may lose hundreds of sales because your website is inaccessible, or if your site is slow to load a visitor might simply hit the back button and choose your rival over you, again resulting in a loss of sales. Here we look at 10 top tips to consider when choosing a new web host.

1. Check out websites hosted by a company – look on a testimonial page to find websites that are hosted by the company you are interested in and if this page doesn’t exist ask the company to provide you with a few websites hosted by them that you can check for speed and reliability. It might also be worth asking the webmaster of these websites how they feel about the hosting company to get a good measure of the worth of the host.
2. Look for good customer support – it is important to choose a web host with good customer support that you can turn to if you have problems with your server. Most hosts now offer telephone support 24 hours a day so it would be best to sign up with one of these. Some hosts advertise this sort of support, but don’t actually provide it so the best way to check is to find a ridiculous hour in the day to give them a call or email them, and see if they can respond!
3. Don’t be fooled by ‘excellent’ deals – it is always said that if something is too good to be true, it probably is. Many hosts offer very cheap prices for unlimited disk space, bandwidth or databases but this often leads to a server that is overloaded with users and eventually crashes, or is slow to respond. Reliability should come before cost.
4. Check out reviews on your host before you buy – there are many websites on the internet that will offer first hand reviews on web hosts so that you can see what regular people think about a particular host. These are often a pretty good indicator of the competence of the host but take care to take these reviews with a pinch of salt – some people will say bad things about a host due to one negative experience that couldn’t have been avoided no matter what host they were with!
5. Work out what you actually need – if you already have a website up and running with another host you will find it very easy to work out what you are using, whether it is 1GB of data transfer a month, or 10GB. You should then search for a host that can offer this (plus a little extra as you will naturally want to expand your business) but not much more – it’s pointless paying for extra stuff.
6. Choose a host that looks after your data – make sure you choose a host that backs up your website files regularly just in case something happens to their servers. You don’t want to wake up one day to find out that your all important database of customers has vanished because your hosting company’s server has gone down – this could ruin your business. Some companies offer real-time dual-server mirroring to make sure your data is backed up properly. Even if you choose a host with this, you should still make sure you keep a good back up on your own computer anyway.
7. Work out whether you need a Linux server or a Windows one – Linux servers can quite often be cheaper and more stable, but they don’t cater for active server pages (ASP). However, for most operations it doesn’t really matter which you go for – just ensure that if you do have specific requirements they are met by the type of server you select.
8. Take a good look at what email solutions are offered – with an expanding business you may wish to have lots of different email addresses for different operations. Check that the host provides enough of these, and look for features such as being able to set up auto-responders, email forwarding and catch-all (to make sure no mail goes astray). If you plan to check your email on the go, check that webmail support is offered.
9. Look carefully at the payment plans – most companies will tell you how much they charge per month, but when it comes to handing over your card details they will expect you to pay for one year up front. If this suits you, then this is fine and is probably the easier way to go about it. If not, you may have to look for someone else who can offer you a month-by-month payment plan. Look for asterisks (*) by prices to check what they really entail.
10. Something that often doesn’t get considered is the location of your host. If you choose one that is in the same region as most of your visitors, it should make a slight difference to loading times and possibly reliability. In the long run, this might get you a few extra visitors to cover the cost of forking out a little extra for a server in your region.

If you follow the tips above you’ll surely find yourself the perfect host to switch to. The main points to remember are not to be fooled by cheap deals that appear to offer you everything (there is a hidden cost in reliability!), check that their service is good by looking at websites hosted by them and, most importantly, choose the package that’s best suited to your needs.

There are literally hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of hosting companies available for you to use, so if you haven’t found yourself the right one, keep on looking until you do. Someone somewhere will have exactly what you need.