You've decided to start an Internet Business so you must choose a hosting company. At this point you should do a little research of your own. I could recommend you some web hosting companies that worked for me but in time the quality of recommended hostings could drop, due to high number of customers. The best way is to show you how to choose, also there's a lot of web hosting companies, is not hard to do, and you must choose by yourself the one that fits with your needs.



Tips in choosing a webhosting company:

Google is your friend, search there first.

You will find a lot of websites that present top hosting companies, please keep in mind that some of that lists are made by hosting companies, or are ads, not real reviews.

After you've choosed a hosting company verify if it has support for PHP and MySQL.

Usualy all hosting companies supports CGI, so if your script is written in Perl it will work.

If you are planning to build multiple webistes please verify if you can setup multiple domains on a single account.

A golden rule: cheap webhosting do not means also reliable hosting. Nowdays many hosting companies offers you 2-4 GB of disk space and 20-40 GB monthly traffic. This is a lot of traffic, a lot of resources, when you start an Internet Business you will not need so much traffic. Only high trafficed website will need 40 GB of monthly bandwidth. Also I've deal with problem when a webhosting offered me 40 GB of webspace but they had so many customers so their webservers were high loaded and from time to time my website could not be accessed.

So you do not need all this web traffic, you need instead a high availability of your website, your website must be accessible anytime. If your website is down, you will lose money and also reputation with your business.

Another golden rule: after you've decided at a hosting company, do a Google search for "hosting" "forum" words and that company name to see if other people had problems with this company. This is important.

Keep in mind that most of the times cheap hosting means bad hosting.

Is good to know that all hosting companies have support for web log analyzers (statistics), email severs, so this will be default, do not worry about that extra options.

So you found the company, you have multiple domain support, you have php and mysql. You did not choose a 5$ / month hosting (cheap=poor quality). What's next?

First time you read web hosting plans and prices you will see that every hosting companies have cheap plans. But when looking carefuly you'll see that even if you buy a 10$ hosting you have to pay for 3 month, also for short period payments on many hosting companies you must pay a setup fee. So when is time to pay (at signup time) you must pay more than 50$, sometims more than 100$. This is the trick some hosting companies are doing, sometimes they offer free setup if you pay for an year. So you must decide carefuly because if you pay for an year and you do not like the quality of hosting? This is the method used by some hosting companies to keep customers. Who pays for an year will stay an year. Also if you pay for 3 month you must pay a setup free, so if you cancel the account you lose that setup fee also. Because of that is good to choose carefuly a hosting company.

So, you will be lucky to find a 5$ host plan and also a free setup of the account, and... a lot of traffic. What does this means? Most of the times it means the web hosting is poor quality, many people are hosted there, your customers will load slow your website and sometimes they could have problems loading your website.

This are things you must consider when choosing a web hosting company. Also please do not forget, as I've told you earlier, do a google search for that hosting company name and words like forum, to see what other people say about choosen hosting company, is easy to learn from other's problems.