Book Description The Web Hosting Hunt will guide you through the crucial information that you will need to know in order to select a web hosting company. This FREE eBook also identifies some of the best hosts on the Web today, and provides plenty of useful tips on selecting the right one for you and your website. Download it now!

1. Contents
1. Choosing between free and paid hosting
2. What do you need your website for?
3. What is your content?
4. What does the Hosting Company Offer? Things you
need to evaluate
5. Evaluating a hosts reputation
6. Summing it all up- Recommended Hosts
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2. Introduction
Finding the right Web Host can be very daunting, especially
since typing ‘web hosting’ in Google will get you a million
search results. Every Web Host seems to be outselling the
others with the best deals and it can be very hard to
distinguish the deals we can trust and the ones we need to
be wary of.
There are several factors we need to consider before
deciding if a particular Web Host is worth our time and
money. After all, the last thing anyone wants to do is
transfer their entire website every few months because their
hosting providers continually fail them.
1. Choosing Between Free or Paid Web Hosting
This all depends on what you want your website for. If you
simply want to have a personal blog to share with friends or
a place to store your photos then free hosting can be fine.
But if you’re planning on creating a business or online store
then paid hosting is much safer and will have much better
features to offer you.
Free websites are excellent for newbies that want to learn all
about web design but don’t want to risk losing money if they
mess up! It’s a great way to learn the ins and outs of web
building and a super way to test your website before actually
using it.
Most free websites have limited disk space, data transfer
and bandwidth but this shouldn’t be an issue if you just want
a small website. Many free hosts will display ads on your site
or pop up ads and this can not only be ugly but annoying to
your visitors.
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3. Paid hosting will have different plans for you to choose from
with added features like free domain names, free sub-
domains, unlimited email accounts, GI-Bin, MySQL
databases, e-commerce set up, shopping carts, and
Microsoft Front Page extensions etc. Many free hosts will not
have these services available.
You’ll most likely find that paid hosting offers much better
customer service and reliability.
BEWARE: One thing that should be known about free
hosting is many hosting sites are purposely set up with the
intention of selling for profit in a few months. What are the
tell tail signs of this?? Usually by offering huge bandwidth
and web space amounts per member. It can be over 100GB
bandwidth and over 10GB+ web space. This attracts a lot of
members which makes it easier for them to sell their
business later.
Often with free hosting the company can collapse quite
quickly due to inexperienced web masters and running out
of funds. You probably won’t have to worry about this kind
of thing with free hosting from Yahoo or any other huge
organization but the chances are much higher coming from
tiny companies no-one has heard of.
Free sites that offer MySQL for free can be a danger and
should be avoided. Why? Well MySQL is a server’s biggest
recourse destroyer and with thousands of free members
using its features like crazy such as forums, blogs and
whatever else will eventually cause slow pages. If a free
hosting company offers MySQL they should charge you a
small fee for it.
Another problem with free hosting is the size of the files
you’re allowed to upload. Many sites have a limit of 5mb
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4. which is fine for a lot of people but if you want to start
uploading programs and zip files that are over 1gig then this
is really going to cause you problems. This isn’t usually an
issue with paid hosting.
Hidden deep within the terms of service of many free sites is
also a condition that ‘x’ amount UNIQUE people must visit
your site per month/week. Many private/personal websites
will never be able to get 10 unique visits per week simply
because their site was made for their own use or for family
and friends. Wouldn’t it be a waste to spend all that time
making your site just to have it deleted!
So at the end of the day it’s usually much safer to get paid
hosting, especially if it’s to host your business or livelihood.
2. What do you need your site for?
A very important question you need to ask yourself is what
kind of website you plan on creating? Is it for personal use,
to store graphics, to create an on line business or something
else? This is a very important factor as it will largely affect
the kind of hosting plan you will need.
Obviously if you just want to have a personal blog or web
space about yourself or an interest you have you won’t be
needing much bandwidth, storage or data transfer per
month. However if your planning on creating an on line
business that must hold a lot of data and will attract large
volumes of visitors per month then your bandwidth and data
transfer need to be much higher.
Sometimes it can be a bit bewildering to decipher which plan
is right for you if you’re not familiar with the terms used in
the plans. Let’s have a quick look at some of the most
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5. important terms you will need to be familiar with in making
the correct hosting plan.
Storage, disk space: This is the amount of storage space
allotted for your website. The more content you want to add
the more space you will require.
Bandwidth: This is the amount of traffic that is allowed to
flow between your web site and the rest of the net.
Data transfer: This is the amount of data you are allowed
to deliver from your site in a given month. Each time your
Web page is viewed or an image, zip file, etc. is loaded, data
transfer is generated and deducted from your allocated
amount.
Ok, now that we know what these important terms mean we
need to evaluate how much of each of them we will need.
Let’s say that you want to have your own e-book business.
You may choose to list your e-books on eBay but your
customers will need to download the e-books from
somewhere. This is where the web space comes in. One e-
book alone can be over 6MB so if you plan on selling
hundreds of e-books you won’t benefit much from having a
hosting plan that only gives you 250MB of storage! You’ll
most likely be needing about 3-10GIG or maybe more.
Similarly if you plan on having a business like that you will
expect to have a large amount of visitors who will be
downloading a lot of zip files so you need to ensure you
have plenty of bandwidth and data transfer.
If your site is just selling mobile phones for example, and
you expect a lot of visitors per month to be placing orders
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6. but not downloading anything then your data transfer can be
lower. It all depends on what you need your website for.
A good hosting package should give you a generous amount
of bandwidth and should even be willing to reset your traffic
volume per month so it won’t pile up.
If your website is just going to be about your love of dogs
and how to take care of them properly then your disk space
and data transfer can be much lower, so too can your
bandwidth if you think only a limited amount of people will
be visiting your site.
3. What is your content?
It’s crucial to ensure that the hosting company you plan to
use actually ALLOWS the kind of content you want to
upload. It’s no use signing up with a company to host your
adult videos on only to find out later that your site was
deleted because they don’t allow that kind of content. So
ALWAYS read the terms and conditions of each host VERY
carefully before signing up. Yes it’s very boring and time
consuming but in the end it will really pay off. A lot of times
you may find that there a rules and regulations that don’t
suit you anyway.
Similarly if you were planning to have an on line store only
to find out later that the web hosting company doesn’t allow
that sort of thing or doesn’t supply the right kind of software
to implement a shopping cart then you would have wasted
your money. Always make sure that the hosting company’s
features meet your demands.
4. What does the Hosting Company offer?
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7. Don’t just look at the prices! Many times you really do get
what you pay for! There are many other factors to look at
besides the price and the amount of space and bandwidth
you get. To get a general idea of the overall service value of
a hosting company you need to evaluate the following
features:
~ Customer Service/Support. Let’s face it, even with the
BEST hosting company things can and will go wrong! It’s
just life and no one is perfect but it shouldn’t be a huge task
to find the answer to a question or have a problem solved by
your support team.
There should be a wealth of information in the FAQ section
and the best form of help is Live Chat! This is a very
important feature as it’s free, fast and instant. You won’t
have to wait for days to get a question answered and can
usually get a problem solved instantly! The customer Service
people should have excellent knowledge of their field and
should be extremely polite and patient.
If live support isn’t available then you should be able to
submit a support ticket and get responded to quickly or be
given a customer service phone number to use. The last
thing you want is to be left hanging for days and weeks
waiting for assistance.
~ Cost: Don’t let this be the ONLY factor that drives your
decision to host your site somewhere. Just because a certain
plan is cheap doesn’t mean that it will meet your criteria.
Paying a little bit extra can really go a long way. Work out
your budget and try and match it to the best plan. You will
need to decide on your billing cycle. Most sites want you to
sign up for a 12 or 24 month period and offer a lower price
per month the longer you sign up for. If you opt for a 1, 3 or
6 month plan then you will most likely being paying more
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8. per month a one time set up fee. In the long run it’s usually
much cheaper to sign up for 12 months or more but you
must have the funds available upfront.
~ Guarantee of uptime: Always look for a guarantee of
minimal downtime and strict service monitoring. If you see
“99.9% uptime” guarantee then you can feel quite safe that
your site will be running smoothly. Its not a really big deal if
your personal website goes down, even if its for a while but
if your on line business goes down it can be a huge problem,
especially if it was down for a week!
As there is no such thing as 100% uptime guarantee I would
avoid companies that claim this. A good reliable host will
post statistics of any downtime on their site for everyone to
view or they should at least tell you if you ask. Be weary if
information about downtime and interruption aren’t shown
great free tool that you can use to monitor your hosting if
you need or want to monitor it yourself.
~ Backups: Even though everyone should ALWAYS keep
their own backup of their site on hand it is also very
important for the hosting company to have regular backups.
You won’t have to worry much about this if your hosting
provides cPanel as it has a very quick and reliable back up
system.
~ Good terms and conditions: If your reading the terms
of service agreement of a particular company and it looks
very short and un-detailed then this could be a problem.
Everyone hates reading through the terms of service but it’s
something very important. The company you want to join
should care about what kind of things are hosted on their
customers sites and should have many restrictions on illegal
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9. practices such as spamming, child pornography, hate sites
and so on.
If too many people start spamming then the hosts IP
address can be blacklisted, your site may slow down and
your emails may not be sent. www.DNSstuff.com is a great
place to go if you want to check if a web host is blacklisted
or not. If the hosting company detects anyone using their
site to send spam or containing anything illegal then their
site should be shut down and their account canceled. The
Web masters should really care what their customers are
using their websites for and have many strict rules about it.
BEWARE: There is NO such thing as ‘unlimited’ bandwidth
or web space. This is false advertising and you should be
very careful about signing up with these companies. “Why
would they offer it if it isn’t real?” you ask! Because it
attracts customers! Besides, they really don’t expect
everyone to really be using that much space and bandwidth
anyway. They figure people will use 1 or 2 gig of bandwidth
a month so they feel safe to offer you an unlimited package.
But let’s look at it seriously for a moment.
If I own an Apple Orchid and I have thousands of apples and
I tell all my customers that they can have unlimited apples
each month is that really true??? Of course not! I only have
a ‘limited’ amount of apples in the first place and it all costs
money but I simply offer this as a way to get people to buy
my produce. I know that most people will be happy to take a
few baskets and go. But what happens if they all decide they
want hundreds and take more than I can offer or afford???
What happens when I run out of money to supply what they
are demanding??
This is what happens with hosting. They tell you its
unlimited but in all reality hosts have to pay for each GB
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10. that is used and hard drives aren’t free so it’s not possible to
ever guarantee unlimited services. They only expect you to
use a certain amount and if you go over it by a lot then
you’re likely to get your hosting canceled. Buried deep in
most terms of service you can see that ‘unlimited’ really
means about 40gig.
~ Domain names: It’s great if a hosting company provides
you with a domain name. Many hosts offer a free domain
name with certain packages but make sure they register it in
YOUR NAME. If it isn’t then you will have problems in the
future if you want to transfer it to another host. You will
ALWAYS need to have your own domain name for a paid
hosting company so make sure you only purchase one that
you will definitely own. It’s also important to see if they
allow you to host more than one domain with them or if they
provide sub domains and how many. This is more important
if you have a large business or want a few different sites.
~ Control Panel: This isn’t very necessary for amateur or
personal websites but it is crucial for a business. This
powerful tool lets you view statistics, manage files and
email, make backups, manage add-ons and many other very
important features. cPanel is one of the most complex and
popular control panels today that gives you the best
controllability and management over your site. If you plan
on having shopping carts, forums, newsletters or anything
else like that on your site then you will definitely want
cPanel or something very similar to manage it all on.
~ Add-ons: Add-ons are great but don’t judge the value of
a hosting plan solely on what bonuses or extras they offer.
Features like pre-made web templates, template wizards
and auto-install scripts that make adding features like
counters, contact forms and other such things easy to install
can be great, especially for a novice web site builder. Having
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11. a pop email account provided with your hosting may be very
important for most business owners so try and look for this
feature as well. Most good hosts offer step by step
instructions on integrating your Microsoft Outlook to receive
your sites emails.
~ Money back guarantee: This is important as there may
be many external reasons why you may need to cancel your
account. Many hosts offer a 30 day money back guarantee
but see if they will give you money back for unused months
too. Ask if the price that you are paying per month is going
to change in the future or if it is guaranteed to stay the
same.
~ Room to grow: Make sure the host has an upgrade
feature that will easily let you upgrade your web features as
your business or site grows. This wont be necessary if the
only plan they offer is exceptional but make sure you check
first. You may start off as a small business and only need
their smallest package but in a year or so that may not fulfill
your needs and you may demand more space, bandwidth,
features and so on. So it’s important that your host will let
your hosting plan grow with your web site demands.
5. Evaluating a hosts reputation
The easiest way to ensure a smooth run with a hosting
company is to find one with an outstanding reputation.
Where can we find such information? Straight from the
customers mouths via website reviews. Whatever you do
DON’T skip this step! It’s very important to see what other
customers are saying about their hosting experiences. If
many people are complaining that a certain host is very slow
and not good with customer service or tech support then it’s
a host you will want to stay clear of. But don’t make the
mistake of reading 3 or 4 bad reviews about a host and
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12. making your decision upon that. Every web hosting company
has problems SOMETIMES and that can’t be avoided. Try to
read as many reviews about the same host as possible
before deciding whether or not they are for you.
BEWARE: Don’t trust any old website when it comes to web
hosting reviews. Many times you will see the same
companies rated in the top 10 hosts despite the fact that
huge amounts of users are complaining about them. Many
large hosting companies will pay commissions to the web
owner of the review sites in hopes that it will refer
customers to their services. There are many good review
sites that aren’t driven by commissions so don’t disregard
review sites altogether. For example, there is one particular
host (that I wont name) that is said to be one of the best
hosts out there but most reviews I have ever from their
customers are very negative.
Some of the best places to find honest reviews are places
like personal blogs or forums where there are no
commissions being offered to the person running it. These
places are where people really speak their minds about how
their experiences have been. These forums are easy to find
via any search engine, just type the host name and the word
‘forum’ and you should get some good results.
I always advise reading reviews from a few different sources
before making a final decision about a particular host. Many
times only annoyed and dissatisfied customers will post
reviews as it’s a way for them to get their anger off their
chest! Try to pay close attention to people who have been
hosting with a particular company for a long time, say 12
months or more. Chances are that if a lot of long term
customers are happy with a host then they must be a pretty
good host. A lot of times you can get impatient and
inexperienced beginners complaining about everything under
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13. the sun simply because they are frustrated and don’t know
what they are doing.
One place I recommend going to for great reviews is
http://www.webhostingjury.com/reviews/
Summing it all up
In conclusion it’s very easy to see that signing up with a
particular hosting company is NOT something that should be
rushed. It should be well researched and planned. But don’t
go over board. It’s possible to find a really great hosting site
within a couple of days or less depending on how prepared
you are how much time you have. Here is a quick check list
of the things you want to investigate when looking at each
hosting plan you find:
~ Amount of bandwidth and data transfer allowed per
month
~ Amount of disk space allocated
~ Customer Service/Support
~ Cost
~ Guarantee of uptime
~ Regular Backups
~ Good terms and conditions
~ Domain names
~ Control Panel
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14. ~ Add-ons
~ Money back guarantee
~ Room to grow
Following the information in this e-book should be more than
enough to help you find your way to a good host. In my
research I have found that the following sites are some of
the very best and have very satisfied user reviews so check
them out:
Host Gator are my FAVE! I have joined with them.
There are NO set up fees and you can pay month by
month! I signed up and only had to pay for my first
month which was $9.95! Fabulous if your on a budget!
My site was up in a matter of mins and the tech
support is outstanding!
HostGator
Host Monster(use with firefox)
Bluehost
Flux Services
Lonex
LunarPages