How to choose good internet web site hosting services

There are several questions you must ask before picking a web hosting service:

1. What will your website be used for?
Do you want to be able to accept credit card payments and have ecommerce options like a shopping cart.? Do you want to use scripts (like PHP, PERL, PYTHON) to make you website more interactive and dynamic? Perhaps you want to complement your website with a Blog or a forum.

2. How much traffic do you think your website will get?
Are you expecting to get more than a million page loads per month? Are your pages memory intensive (lots of graphics, downloads, ...)?

3. What is your budget?
Do you just want a free web hosting service that will allow you to have a simple family website online? If you are OK with having other peoples ads on your site, you will have no problem finding hosting service. Simply type “free web hosting” into Google and you will have a plethora of choices. You can even get free hosting from Yahoo (it is called Geocities). However, ad free internet web site hosting services are harder to find. Here are several ad free internet web hosting services. Typically you can get 50 MB of disk space, greater than 5 GB / month bandwidth, scripting support, and 1 mySQL Database. Not bad at all when you consider it is free. Maybe you would like to have a really professional internet web hosting service but don’t want to spend a lot of money. Luckily, today there is so much competition between internet web site hosting services that you can get a really great web hosting service for about $8/month. There are also paid services that cost about $3-4/month. However, I have found these cheap internet hosting services only marginally better than the free web hosting services. If you want to use your website for business or you just want to have option of adding rich features to your web site you should stick with the $8/month web hosts. Here is a review of some of the best full featured internet web hosting services.

4. What is your skill level at configuring a web server?
If you want to avoid complicated script installations and code modification, your web hosting service should be equipped with a good cPanel (control panel). It is highly desirable to have a cPanel with Fantastico. A cPanel with Fantastico will allow you to install features like a Word Press Blog, autoresponders (email newsletter software), a forum, a credit card processing system, image galleries, and many others with just a few simple clicks from within your web browser. Cool right! You don’t even have to know much technical stuff at all. Even if you know lot of technical stuff about web servers you will certainly save time with these auto installs. Ease of use is probably the most important feature of a good internet web hosting service.

5. How much disk space will your site require?
This should be pretty easy for you to estimate. These internet web hosting services will give you between 5-40 GB for about $8/month.