How To Choose A Reliable Web Hosting Company

1. First & foremost do searches in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo & MSN. Simply enter terms like "Complaints about 'Your Potential Host's Name'", "Hosting Reviews ", etc.....You will find a lot of stuff regarding your potential host. Search for web hosting forums; there are numerous such forums on the web that contain all kinds of information. Look for and read articles written about web hosting. If you find too many complaints about your potential web hosting company....beware!Note: A company that is offering too many features for too little is suspect! If they are offering huge amounts of bandwidth and disk space for a very low price, be careful!. Here is why: The company will most likely be forced to host numerous websites per server, resulting in congestion and server overload. The result: Your site may be too slow and may experience lots of downtime.
   
2. A foreign based hosting company may be too far away from your customers. It won't serve you well if your host is based in Australia and your targeted customers are based in The United States. On the contrary, if your are marketing to customers exclusively in Australia, a web hosting company in Australia would be OK. If you are marketing worldwide, your choice becomes a little bit more complicated....unless of course you are Google, Yahoo or MSN, big companies who host their websites almost everywhere worldwide! Generally, we prefer web hosting companies located in The United States. Here is a good list of web hosting companies country-wise.
   
3. How fast is your web host? Find a couple of sites that are hosted by your potential web hosting company and test how fast their pages load on your computer. You also may execute the "PING" and "TRACEROUTE" commands on these websites to determine their suitability. Executing the ping command is called "pinging" a website and it determines how quickly a server can receive and send back a piece of data through your connection. When you run ping it sends a small packet of data and calculates the time it takes to get a response from the server. It is executed four times by default and a small report of average, minimum, and maximum response times will be displayed. A ping output typically consists of the packet size used, the host queried, the ICMP sequence number, the time to live, and the latency. All times are given in milliseconds. A ping output indicating large values and/or lost packets consistently over a period of time ....is a red flag!. Please note that if you have a bad or restrictive connection(Your ISP), the results may be skewed. Firewalls and proxy servers installed in your system or network can sometimes interfere with the ping operation. Also, some web hosting companies do not allow "pinging" of their servers, in which case you will get a "Request Timed Out" message. The Traceroute utility displays the connection [path] through the Internet between your computer and the potential web hosting company's server(s). The path between these two locations has many routers, computers and other devices along it which help move Internet information. Each movement from one device to the other is called a "hop". Too many "hops" is cause for concern ....do several Traceroutes for comparison!.

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