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Selecting the right web hosting company is not always an easy task but here are some tips that can help you select the right company.

Customer Support

Try to test the customer support before committing to any web hosting company.. The best way to test out a host’s support is calling in. You’ll be surprised how many hosts with an 800 number never answer their phones, or have long hold times. E-mailing a hosting company or submitting a ticket to their sales department is not the way to test a host! Many of the companies have incredible response times when contacting their sales department, very few have good times when contacting support. After all they don’t make money by supporting you. They only make money by selling to you. Try to look for web hosts that have a 24/7 chat system for support.

Never Pay Yearly

Another thing you’ll notice is that most of these incredible scam plans force you to pay for a year up front to get the good pricing. Why would a hosting company care if you pay monthly or yearly? After all if you’re happy with them you’re going to end up staying much longer than a year. Merchant fees aren’t that much so why? It’s because most have horrible support, slow servers, or even tons of downtime. If you were paying month to month you’re not going to stick around, but if you paid for a year up front what are you going to do? You won’t get your money back so you have no choice but to stay with them. ONLY PAY MONTHLY!  Remember paying yearly to anyone is always a bad idea, but the choice is yours.  All we’re saying is no matter how good a company is anything can come up, and you could lose your upfront payment.

Customer Reviews

Don’t believe anything you read on the hosting directories. They don’t care who they recommend as they are all paid listings. The highest bidder gets the spot. What you should do to find reviews is search google using the company’s name. If they have been around a year you should find many real reviews of people who use their hosting. Another good place to check would be the company’s forum, but don’t always believe what you see. If someone writes something bad in the forum most hosts will delete their post and ban the user.

Getting Kicked

If it sounds too good too be true it usually is! All hosts have the same basic limitations when it comes to server resources and specs. There is no magic server that has a never ending supply of RAM and CPU. If a host ever claims to give unlimited space or bandwidth DO NOT JOIN THEM. The thing to remember is that the average web site uses about 50 Megs space and less then 1 gig bandwidth a month. So what hosting companies do is they lie! They make up scam plans with tons of space and bandwidth for around $8 bucks a month. It’s a numbers game…. Only one or two of every 100 people that signup on the plan are going to use all the bandwidth advertised. So what do they do? They usually terminate the sites that use it saying “your site is using too many resources.” They aren’t lying about the resource usage. IT’S the truth! Most people don’t realize that bandwidth and space used have nothing to do with the server resources being used. Resource usage has to do with the amount of CPU and RAM a site uses. If a site uses a lot of bandwidth they aren’t kicked for using their bandwidth they are kicked for using up most of the servers cpu and ram. Another thing to remember is that the cheaper the plan is, and the more space / bandwidth included the more sites per server the host will have to pack in to make their money back. So the lesson here is don’t shop for a host based on their plans! You should shop based on recommendations and experience!

How old ?

Do a whois on their domain name. Then look for the creation date of the domain name. If the domain name was created less then a year ago it’s more of a risk to join that hosting company. They could be a great host, but considering more then 95% of new hosts go out of business within a year that really isn’t something you should be taking a chance on. It’s too easy to become a hosting company. All someone has to do is join our reseller plan and they are now a host. Sure the hosting may be good, but that doesn’t mean they are going to provide good support nor does it mean they are going to pay their hosting bill.