How To Choose Web Hosting ..that's right for your business.

The array of hosting currently available is nothing less than astonishing.  Although there are literally tens of thousands of hosting companies in the USA and Canada alone, the fact is that there are only a handful of major providers.  Just below this group of massive companies you have their resellers. These are basically branded "store fonts" for the underlying large web hosting company.

In this reseller arrangement, the parent host normally handles all of the support, etc., and as such the service is generally very reliable, and the service excellent, with 24 hour/7 day per week live support normally offered.

Where the pitfalls often arise are in the local "county" or even smaller hosting companies.  Because of economy of scale, smaller hosts may have difficulty providing services at a competitive price, and as such are forced to take one of two measures, both of which errode the value of hosting with a local company;

1. "Server stuffing". This is when far too many accounts are on a single server.  What this means is that the server slows, runs hot and unreliable, and potentially loses revenue or even worse, all of your data. This is not to mention that fact that your visitors or customers may not be able to connect to your site, and if they can't reach your product, well, you know what happens...they go elsewhere.  There should be a limit on how many accounts are on any given server. Ask yourt host how many will be on your server.  Of course, if it's a dedicated server, you will be the only customer on it.
2. "Nickel and dime" you for every feature. They may charge value-added fees for extra email accounts, databases, domains, etc., all of which are really at a negiligible cost to the host, if any.  This is about the most common way hosts "scrape" for more revenue, especially the smaller ones.  Be sure you know in advance what your web host is including in your package, and what the ongoing costs will be.

There are great deals to be found in web hosting, so long as you take a moment and be sure you know what you NEED, not what the hosting salesman says you WANT.  Ask your company webmaster (assuming it isn't you :>) if he or she needs PHP or ASP (these are server programming languages - like html), CGI, Databases, etc.  Just knowing these things will put you ahead of the crowd.

Do you need Managed Hosting, a Dedicated Server, Shared Hosting, or Virtual Private Hosting? There are reasons for all of them, so brush up on it a bit before you get started.