Web Hosting Reviews and Recommendations

Requirements

The first thing to decide is what you actually need for your web site. Try thinking around these topics:
Bandwidth Requirements - This is determined by how many visitors your site gets. It is usually measured by how many megabytes will be downloaded each month.
Speed - The faster the better, but high speed servers cost more. Decide how important this is to you.
Reliability - Web sites should be accessible 24 hours a day, but this is rarely the case if you use a cheap web host.
Hosting Features - What you need the web host to be able to do for you.
If you examine the web sites of a few good hosts, you will soon discover exactly what sort of features are available.
Clever things like message boards and voting polls need some sort of server side scripting such as CGI, ASP or PHP. Access to raw log files is useful, so that you can learn about your visitors. If you want to use a database, make sure that option is available. Most of my other questions would be about domain names: Can I host more than one? What about hosting a .co.uk or .cc domain? Will my site be available through mydomain.com as well as www.mydomain.com, and can I set up other subdomains? It is worth asking this sort of question before you buy rather than after!

Get Recommendations

Don't judge a web host by how nice their web site looks, judge it by what it's customers tell you! It is quick and easy to search the usenet archives for conversations about a particular hosting company, and is a great way to find out how good a hosts reliability and customer service are.

Beginners

Hosting a web site can be quite confusing for beginners. The first time you launch a site it is useful to follow a step by step guide. SiteBuildIt includes a very good action guide that will walk you through every step. And that's not all that's included in the package! More details...

Advanced Users

This web site has been hosted by HyperMart for more than five years and I can honestly say that I have no complaints. The service is fast, reliable and comes with more features than I could ever need.

There are a lot of good web hosts around these days and I have sites hosted with several other companies. One other that I would recommend is WestHost, so you may also want to see what they offer.

If you want a budget host to use as a secondary or backup server, consider eMaxHosting. They allow an unlimited number of domains and have generous disk space and bandwidth allowances, all for $5.95 per month. This isn't some fly-by-night company either. They have been in business for several years and have a 99.5% uptime guarantee.

Click here to read more about using a secondary server to achieve 100% uptime.