When you need your websites hosting, where do you start looking? Typing "websites hosting" in Google or your favourite web browser will bring you up hundreds of possibilities. So where do you start looking?

In the first instance, you need to know whet to expect for your money. And yes, it will cost you money (although probably not as much as you might think). Websites hosting can be done with free hosting, but you will find that such accounts are very restrictive, and if you need anything beyond a couple of text pages, you will need more.

My main criteria for my websites hosting is the quality of support that you receive. Many hosts are great when it comes to selling you a system and setting it up, but the test of a truly professional and responsible host is how they react when you are under pressure. It is when the chips are down and something goes wrong that you will need your host to be supportive, and not all of them are.

The next, and probably most obvious criteria is that of resources. How much bang will you get for your buck? Most hosts these days will allow you a good deal of web space and a healthy bandwidth quota, but be careful that you don't buy more than you need. If the web site you are building will be hungry on resources then you need to be aware of this when you are looking for your websites hosting.

To give you some sort of guide, any web site that dispenses audio or video will require a fair bit of disk space, and a correspondingly high amount of bandwidth. Email can be a hog as well, especially if you use your account extensively.

As a rule of thumb, I reckon on ten times the amount of bandwidth allocation to the amount of disk space allowed. So for example if your disk space allowance if 100Mb, then you should reckon on 1000Mb for bandwidth.

The final criteria I personally go by is the features that your potential websites host offers. By this I mean things like script and software support, well speced hardware, backup levels and things of this ilk. The ability to support scripts is not essential, but the likelihood is that as your web site grows, you will want to add functionality via scripts. If you intend to run a blog then script support is essential.

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About the Author:
Charles L Cory is an online entrepreneur who has been building websites and earning a living from the Internet for a number of years.

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