How to Choose a Webhosting Company

When you choose a webhosting company for your particular webhosting needs, you may find it difficult, with thousands of wehosting companies all claiming to have the best deal online.

One of the most important factors in selecting a webhosting company is the percentage of server uptime. Most hosting companies guarantee 99% uptime - meaning your website will be online 99% of the time. Even though technical difficulties will happen to even the most professional webhosting company, With modern webhosting technology, anything less than 99% uptime is not acceptable.

Another factor is the amount of disc space that is provided for files and materials that you will upload to your website. Not too many years ago, 300 megabytes was considered a large amount of disc space, but not today.

Particularly true for a website that will feature digital downloads or large graphics, 1000 megabytes of disc space is a minimum level. Many webhosting companies now offer basic packages that include 10,000 or more megabytes of disc space.

Monthly bandwidth or "transfer" reflects the amount of data that visitors can access from your website in any given month. Once again, the standards of yesterday's webhosting companies have been outweighed by modern servers and less expensive webhosting server technology. Where 10,000 megabytes of monthly transfer was once the norm, today's competitive webhosting company must offer many times that amount to stay in the game.

One webhosting company (the one we use to host the website you are reading right now!) offers 1 million megabytes of transfer per month for only $9.95 US.

So the first consideration when you choose a webhosting company are to get the maximum amount of disc space and monthly transfer (bandwidth) as possible. That will allow you plenty of room for future updates and increased website traffic as your site becomes popular with Internet users.

You may or may not need these features right away, but it's also important to choose a webhosting company that supports PHP language and provides MySQL databasing. Most webhosting companies supply those features these days, and will clearly say so on their salespage.

In addition, for those planning an ecommerce or catalog sales website, shopping cart software and SSL (secure socket layer) will also be important factors when you choose a webhosting company. Both those features will be required to run your own merchant account and accept credit card payments at your website.

There is stiff competition among webhosting companies, which gives a strong advantage to those who are looking to choose a webhosting company. We suggest you investigate several webhosting companies before making your choice.