1. Phone Support – Any major web hosting company is going to offer phone support and I wouldn’t host without it. Imagine your website goes down on a day when you have a press release coming out or some other major event where you expect a surge in website traffic. Now imagine that your website goes down and all you can do is send and email to support. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience and phone support is a necessity. Don’t even consider a web host unless they have a posted phone number on their website.

2. Uptime Guarantee – Most hosting companies will offer something like “99.9% Uptime Guarantee”. This is something to look for as well, 99.9% is very good and really no one can guarantee 100% uptime. I’m sure some companies will claim 100% uptime but just be sure that they offer something very close to 99% uptime.

3. Monthly Commitments – I don’t really recommend paying for a year or so upfront. If you sign-up with a hosting company and find out that it doesn’t meet your needs you’re really not out anything. Granted, most offer a 30 day money back guarantee but why have to mess with billing or customer support when you can simply pay month to month. Once you’ve had a chance to host your website for a couple months you may consider committing for a year so that you don’t have the month to month billing plus you’ll find that you generally will save money by prepaying for a year but I don’t suggest signing up for a full year right off the bat.

4. Setup Fees – Unless your getting into a dedicated machine or something that requires custom configuration I would never recommend signing up with a web hosting that requires a setup fee. There are too many reputable web hosting companies that don’t charge a setup fee.

5. 30 Day Money Back Guarantee – What is it going to hurt to be able to try out a web host and know that you can get your money back if you’re not satisfied with their service or support. Again, there are too many reputable companies out there that offer 30 day money back guarantees out there to not choose one.

That’s it for this post, I’m going to leave one more post regarding web hosting and we’ll get into design & the rest of the basics.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com