There is a great deal of hype, misinformation and consequent uncertainty about webhosting on the Internet. Many webhosting companies make claims to be the best and you see all sorts of pricing out there.
So if you are starting out, where should you start? Here are some guidelines that should help:
1. Remember that there are lots of webhosts out there, and there is much competition amongst them. If you shop around, you can find good deals.
2. Those that make the most “noise”, that advertise the most and aggressively seek new clients, are spending a lot on promotion, the costs of which will come out in the prices you pay. Go cautiously with these. Don’t get pushed into a bad deal.
3. What you want is good quality hosting with account options that leave you room to expand. Generally speaking, you will want:
A. High uptime (99.9%) with a guarantee. A cheap webhost whose servers go down frequently means that your customers will not be able to find your website and will go somewhere else. Uptime percentage is very important to you, the user. Also, many SAY they have 99.9% uptime, but it’s not true. Look for a guarantee with teeth, like one that refunds a portion up to all of your webhosting fee if they do not meet the 99.9% goal.
B. Accounts that allow multiple domains. In reality, the web host’s costs are mainly for storage space and bandwidth. You can find webhosting accounts that set limits on these and then let you put up as many domains as you wish within those space and bandwidth limits.
C. Good support, 24/7
D. Up-to-date servers that support all standard protocols and features such as Fantastico, latest versions of php, etc.
4. It’s difficult to tell whether a given webhost lives up to its claims or really knows what “quality” support is. For this reason it’s best to pay by the month, at least at first. If it doesn’t work out, you can try another. Don’t get trapped into a one-year prepaid contract with a second-rate webhost!
If you want to study and learn a great deal about webhosting, visit Web Hosting Talk. That’s a huge industry forum of webhosts, with all kinds of info.
You can scroll down to the bottom of the home page to “Advertising Forums”. Under that look for “Web Hosting Offers” at the top of the list. Here you will find literally hundreds of webhosts offering their services, side by side.
That kind of cuts through the hype and claims; gets down to “What do they offer?” and “What does it cost?” 
Like going to a farmer’s market where different vendors sell similar products. No way to price gouge, all sellers have to be competitive or they sell nothing…
Of course it takes time to sort through the offers. I went through that, tried several. One was a disaster! Search on my username there, (jorchav) to read about it. A few more were tried and culled out for one reason or another.
Finally I settled on three.
Host 9 for good service, a variety of options and excellent prices. I use them for non hi-tech applications and websites and they are fine for that. Their prices start at $3.95* a month for unlimited web storage space and unlimited bandwidth (Well there ARE some limits, but you would have to try pretty hard to reach them!). That comes with unlimited domains, sub-domains and e-mail addresses. They are international; you can put up websites on their servers in the U.S. Europe and Asia…
* There is usually a 10% off coupon deal working that lets you save 10% on that… [For the month of June, 2011, there is a discount deal for 25% off!]
I also use Hawk Host for good prices and excellent support. I use them for high-volume sites and anything technical or complex. They always help me out of problems. Each time I ask for support they solve the problem AND give me more experience and education in both avoiding and solving that kind of server-side problem in the process.
A basic account is 3gb storage, 30gb bandwidth, unlimited domains. It goes at $3.95/month, but you have to pay three months at a time. Well, what the heck! That’s only $11.85 every 3 months.
India Nets is another great low-cost webhost with excellent service and a friendly, helpful, tech support group. I’ve had two accounts with them for well over 3 years now. And I can personally testify to their better than 99.9% uptime!.
Their hosting plans start at 1gb of space, 10gb bandwidth for 1 domain at $1.99 a month or $19.99 per year, 2 gb space 2gb bw, 10 domains $2.99/mo. or $29.99/year and go up from there. Their annual rates are generally 10 x monthly rates.
They can also supply you with hosting on up to 200 different class C IP’s for about $2 per month each; less if you pay a year in advance. They come in units of 5 hosting slots for 5 different class C IP’s each unit. You can get any amount from 5 to 200. Makes it easy to start out small and grow to whatever level you want/need.
Why do I use more than one webhost?
Good question. I discussed that in in another blog entry here, “Defensive Webhosting and Domain Name Registration.”
Jorge Chavez
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