Key Selection Criteria For Choosing a Web Hosting Provider

Here below, a list of key selection criteria to help you choose the ideal web hosting provider. These are all critical features that identify what you should request and expect from your hosting provider to save stress and time.

1. Customer service: Check if your hosting provider has a customer service that is competent and ready to help if you have a problem. Send your requests and see how quick the customer service replies. If your hosting provider claims to have 24/7 support, test it by sending an e-mail during the weekend. You may also want to be sure that you receive help by friendly people, who are not there just because you are a paying customer.
2. Online reputation: Sign up with a web hosting provider that has reputable credentials that can be trusted. Reputation can be measured just by looking at these simple things: reviews the hosting provider receives from customers, comments inside the forum of the provider web site and whether the hosting provider has been short in business.
3. Money back guarantee: Pay attention to the refund policy of your web hosting provider. Does your provider give your money back if you are not satisfied with it? Do you get a full refund or just a part of your money? Make sure you read your contract very carefully.
4. Guaranteed uptime: Look for a minimum uptime of 99.5%. 99% is too low for a web hosting provider that claims to be reliable, because a 0.5% of downtime translates into several hours when your site is down and unreachable. Notwithstanding this, keep in mind that you will need clear and documented proofs to show your hosting provider it has not matched its promise.
5. Monthly, not forced yearly pre-payments: Choose a monthly solution to pay your bills to the hosting provider. When you are still testing different options and companies, you might opt to go monthly and not to pay in advance for a year-long contract. By paying monthly, you can switch to another hosting provider whenever you want, without feeling forced to stay with a company for a fixed time. You might consider to pay in advance for a yearly plan only after you have long tested your hosting provider.
6. Quality of user control panel: To manage your web hosting files you need a control panel, which is a personal web page that you use to upload files, scripts and perform other operations on your site. Having a user interface that is clear and understandable for anyone, and not just for geeks, is very important to avoid stress and mistakes. Request a demo or a screenshot of the control panel and judge for yourself if it is the right solution for your competences.
7. Monthly bandwidth: Check whether the hosting provider gives you sufficient monthly bandwidth to ensure efficient data transfer. The bandwidth is the amount of data that goes in and out of your server when your viewers watch a video, read content, make a purchase or do anything else on your site. Make sure that the amount of bandwidth supported by your hosting plan matches your needs.
8. Disk space: Be aware of the amount of disk space you get from your web hosting provider. Even though providers tend to give you way more space than your web site needs, you should be concerned if you publish lots of videos, offer large files for download or manage content that requires several disk space to be hosted.
9. Log file analysis tool: Check with your hosting provider which software is used to analyze log files and generate statistic reports. The standard in the industry is Webalizer, but your hosting provider may go for a different solution. Also check if you are able to export log files to your computer and use your own tool to manage statistic reports.
10. E-mail management and support: Look at the e-mail management solution your hosting provider gives you. All providers support e-mail management, but not everyone has advanced features like auto-responders, mail forwarding, virus protection or junk mail filters. Check also the number of separate mailboxes you are allowed to create inside your domain.
11. Number of separate FTP accesses: Having different FTP accesses allows you and your collaborators to manage your web site independently. The site owner can thus allow other people to work on her site without giving away her personal credentials.
12. Publishing platform integration: Verify if your hosting provider supports a pre-installed publishing platform like WordPress or Movable Type. You may save the time and stress of setting up a publishing platform on your own and also receive support from the same customer service of your hosting provider.
13. Backups: Having persistent, automatic backups of your data is highly recommended. If something goes wrong, you can always recover your data and start again without losing hours or even years of work. Be sure to check with your hosting provider which data is backed up (files, databases, server settings, etc.), how often (daily, weekly, monthly) and where backups are stored (off-server or off-site).
14. PHP, Perl, MySQL support: Make sure your web hosting provider supports fully and explicitly PHP, Perl and MySQL databases. You will need all of these elements to run a professional web site which needs advanced customization and scripting.

source from: http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-web-hosting-providers-guide-how-to-choose-the-ideal-hosting-solution/