Things You'll Need:
- Good reading and listening skills
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Step 1
First, make sure they have a phone number, and they actually answer it when you call them. It may be a little more of an expensive web host, but rest assured its well worth the money especially in emergencies.
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Step 2
Second, if you have a small website that doesn't get much traffic, shared hosting is fine for that particular moment, but if you have an inkling of a thought that your site may grow even remotely fast, I would choose a unique hosting service called grid hosting, and it's relatively inexpensive, like $20 a month. And it can be better than the way more expensive $50-$100 dedicated hosting service because they put your website on multiple servers so if your website gets overwhelmed with a ton of traffic, it won't ever go down because grid hosting will draw resources from the millions of other servers that your website is on. Very few services offer grid hosting. I personally use a company called MediaTemple.com. I believe they are the best, they host very well known sites like Starbucks,ABC,Adobe,Sony. I mean the list just goes on and on. They offer 24 hour phone support with a great staff. You can get grid hosting for $20 bucks a month with them or $16 a month if you pay a year's amount in full, upfront. Another company that offers grid hosting is Godaddy. I personally haven't tried them so I couldn't tell you how they are.
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Step 3
Third, make sure you read reviews on your potential webhost just to get a feel for how they've treated customers in the past. You can find reviews by just typing in said company and the reviews in a Google search.
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Step 4
Fourth, don't fall for the unlimited or unmetered bandwidth claim on shared hosting. It's just a marketing tool to get you to purchase into their webhosting. Sure, they really give you unlimited bandwidth, but the problem is, if you use up to many of their cpu resources on their shared server, they will suspend your account no matter how much bandwidth you use. Shared hosting is for small low traffic sites only, no matter how much bandwidth they claim to give you. Then what they do after you use to much of their resources on the shared server, is they come at you trying to get you to buy their more expensive dedicated hosting services which can cost in upwards of between $50-$100 a month ! And even that's not better than grid because it's still just one server. With grid you're on multiple servers, and it's cheaper. Grid hosting is the happy medium way to go if you're planning on hosting a site that you think may grow into at least 5,000 visitors a day or more. Or if you already have a site that has high traffic.
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Step 5
In conclusion, I've covered the basic important aspects of choosing a web host. The ones that pertain to your site actually staying online. The amount of storage space will depend on how much you personally need. I do know that mediatemple.com offers a whopping 100gb of storage on their $20 grid hosting plan which is way more than I need. If you have like a huge video site or something, you'd have to workout rates with them personally, to find the best plan for you. Also mediatemple.com is great for Wordpress powered sites like the one I have because Wordpress can use up a lot of cpu resources. I've written this how to article after learning a very hard lesson about picking false shared hosting plans, and having my site suspended for high traffic. If you follow these instructions, this should never happen to you.
