How to choose a web hosting service?

Indeed, choosing a right webhosting service for your website is not an easy task, especially when there are thousands of web hosting providers all offering almost identical web hosting packages. Therefore, it is important to know few major considerations even before you start your web hosting search. There are three major criteria for web host seekers:

Web hosting features requirement

This is probably the most important to start finding a host for your site factor. You need to decide the technical requirements for your website, this including:

a) server platform and hardware requirements

If you plan to set up a website that uses programming environments such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic scripts, Cold Fusion or Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL database, in this case, you will need to find a web hosting service that supports Windows platform such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers.

Similarly, if you plan to use programming languages such as Perl, CGI, SSI, PHP or mySQL database, then any web hosting plans that support Unix platform / Linux should be sufficient to meet your needs Hosting. Once you have these server platform and hardware requirements in mind, you can decide the best web hosting plans for your needs. For more information, please read "How to select a web server and server platform?"

b) disk space and bandwidth required

Here is another technical requirement that you need to consider before choosing a web hosting plan, ie disk space and bandwidth. If you intend to publish a website that does not have a lot of contents (meaning, web pages), the disk space requirement may not be a big concern for you. In general, a disk space of 200 MB with 500 MB should be enough to meet your hosting needs. However, if you plan to host a website with enormous amount of graphic pictures, MP3 or video files, then you should consider a web hosting plan that provide huge disk space, for example, 500 MB 1000 MB

Similarly, the requirement of bandwidth depends on your estimation of site traffic. Obviously, a website that expect to attract high traffic will consume the monthly allowance very fast bandwidth. If this is the case, you will need to find a web hosting service that offer huge bandwidth with 40 GB to 100 GB per month. Depending upon your website requirement, choosing a web hosting service that provide sufficient amount of disk space and bandwidth is crucial consideration to prevent paying extra costs in the future should you overuse the disk space and monthly bandwidth allocation.

c) Other accommodation options

While the above requirements are of utmost importance, there are other accommodation options you have to
consider too. Can web hosting provider support video clips on your site, if you have? Compatible with Dreamweaver or FrontPage web authoring tool web hosting service? Do you plan to set up a virtual store online? The host can support the e-commerce features without adding extra cost to your monthly payments? In addition, you can also see the number of email accounts provided, number of FTP accounts, web statistics software (analyze web traffic), type of control panel supported (manage your account with web hosting), database and scripting languages supported, etc

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.