webhosting_01.jpgIts friday, and its time for my very first Friday guide.
Finding a webhost can be so easy, yet so hard. Space, bandwidth, price and many other factors will decide what hosting you buy. With hundreds of hosts going in to business each day, its pretty hard to find a reliable, yet less expensive host.

Here’s a few tips that will save you time, money, and overall, will save you the hassle.

  1. Determine what you will need before you actually go looking for a host. How much bandwidth do you need? How much disk space? Will you expect a lot of traffic? Do you need databases? PHP? Asking yourself these questions will help you narrow down what hosts are available to you.
  2. How much are you willing to spend? $10, $20, up to $50 a month? If you are just going to start your own blog, you shouldn’t need to spend more than $10 a month + the cost of registering a domain name for 1 year. If your project involves you have to need more than 50Gb of bandwidth a month, consider the Virtual Dedicated Server option. It might save you from account terminations from shared hosting.
  3. Investigate. Read as many reviews as you can! No advertising strategy is better than by word of mouth from past and current customers. Through them, you will get all the information you need, sans the bullshit. Here’s a good community you can turn to when you need to review a host.
  4. Once you see a web host that offers what you need, and has its services in your price range, test their support. Simply send a basic email asking for a response. Tell them that you are testing to see how long they take to respond. Altough its better to leave that out of the subject line, you can include that in the body of the email.
  5. By going through the steps mentioned above, you should have narrowed your hosts by a significant number. But if you are still having trouble, try and ask websites or blogs that you visit frequently and that you have never noticed any downtime. They, more than likely, would be happy to point you to their own web hosts. Specially if its through a referral.

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