It’s an especially common question from newbies.  There certainly are a lot of choices out there, which may seem like a good thing, but it’s hard to tell the solid hosting companies from all the crap that’s out there.

Goodness knows I had to learn the hard way. I’ve used many of the web hosts that are out there.

So I can tell you from my own personal experience that Hostgator and Hostmonster are probably the best ones.

From a webmaster’s perspective, the main purpose of a hosting company is real simple:  Keep my site up and running smoothly, and don’t bother me.  I just simply don’t want to have to worry about it.

You have to understand that most of the hosting packages that you see marketed and sold to people, are just simply not going to be used by the average person.  For example, how many hosting companies you see that offer something insane like 800 GB of disk space?? 

That’s probably more than you have in your entire hard drive. Unless you plan on having a video website that 800 GB will probably never be used, so there is really no need to spend that kind of money on it. 

These are just some of the features that really aren’t that important to you.

Let’s start focusing on some of the features that you do need.

1. Support – This is absolutely critical. If you are wondering why, it’s real simple.  THERE WILL BE PROBLEMS.  I don’t care what hosting company you use, that is just something you have to accept.  It’s a part of running a website.

The important thing isn’t what the problem is.  The important thing is how quickly your web host fixes the problem.  It may be a case of a lagging server.  If so, does the hosting company know about it and how are they taking care of it.

If I were to call them, am I going to speak somebody who sounds disinterested in my problem, and doesn’t really care about helping me or am I going to talk to somebody knowledgeable and really interested in fixing the problem? 

3.  Important features -  Let’s face it, a web host nowadays should definitely have cPanel or at the very least Fantastico.  It also helps if they have clear and concise tutorials that you can follow along with.

4. Reliability – This falls under the “No duh!” category.  It’s only natural that once in a blue moon you get some downtime, but it’s important that a company stands behind their 99.9% uptime guarantee.  

5.  User friendly – I’ll admit.  I am not much of a techie.  I suppose I’m a little better than most people, but compared to most webmasters, I’m below average. If there is something that I want to do on my hosting account, I shouldn’t have to be a computer wizard to be able to pull it off.  It should be accessible to all people, irregardless of their technical background.   

6.  Price – Obviously, you don’t want to spend too much on hosting, especially when you are just beginning, but truthfully, there really isn’t that much of a difference in prices between hosting companies nowadays.  They are all pretty much around the same price area. Both Hostmonster and Hostgator are about average as far as price is concerned.      

7. Deciding on Linux or Windows hosting – For me, this is an absolute no-brainer.  Linux is definitely the way to go. If the hosting company you are looking at isn’t offering linux web hosting, forget about them.

Here are just some of the headaches I’ve had to deal with when trying some of the other web hosts out there.

If you’ve searched around the internet long enough, I’m sure you’ve heard of the reputation that GoDaddy has built for themselves. If you don’t know…..well…..It’s not good.  They may be the hosting company with the most ads on TV, but most webmasters would never use their hosting.  Buying domain names from them are ok, just as long as you are not using their hosting.  I learned that the hard way.  Let’s just say there were a lot of outages.

I tried 1&1 hosting, and I really wasn’t satisfied with their lack of customer service.  Not only did I have to wait on the phone for an hour, but when I got the privilege of getting somebody on the line, they were incredibly snippy with me.

StartLogic is ok.  I just found them to be somewhat limited in the features they offer.

I incurred some hidden fees from Bluehost, which I wasn’t thrilled about when I got my bill.

I probably have more stories about other hosting companies that I have used but for the life of me, I can’t remember them all.