There are thousands of companies around the world that sell hosting services. Most of them charge per month, but price should not be your only criteria when choosing a host for your pages. You should keep in mind the followings and then find the service that provides the quality you look for at the most affordable cost.
- Technical support is one the most important issues when choosing a web host. Do they offer support by phone, email? And if so, how long will it take to get back to you?
- How much disk space is offered to you? Remember that pages uses a very little amount of space, but multimedia files (pictures, videos, sound clips) use much larger quantities.
- Do they offer domain registration and how much will it cost.
- Do their servers support CGI-scripts, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Front Page extensions, SSH connection and Telnet?
- How fast is their connection to the Internet and do they have multiple connections in case of a problem or damage?
- If you would like to run Java/Java EE applications on your site or build a site with JSP, your host must support Java apps and run a Jakarta/Tomcat, Jboss, Glassfish or other Java server.
- Do they offer a stastistics service to let you have a look on your site traffic and hit?
- How much bandwitch do they offer per month? For example 2GB bandwitch for a site full of videos and images is too low.
- Do they offer one-click installation for commonly used free web apps (like Drupal and WordPress)?
- What site management application is used (for example Plesk or Cpanel)?
Intresting check-list. I have pretty mucht the same, yet i leave the Java option out 🙂
But isn’t there also the price to consider in function of the options you get?
What I am trying to say: You can find a perfect host with good support, and a large space, great speeds and no traffic limits, but if you can’t afford it, that host wouldn’t match my definition of ‘a good web host’ 😉
@ Ronny: You are right! The best solution is to find the better performance to cost value!