As with most investments, our initial reaction when choosing a web hosting company is to go with the least expensive. Hey, they're all alike, why pay more? Au contraire.
There are a number of objective criteria that separates one web hosting company from others and cost is just one of them. And not the most significant one. Choosing a company based on cost alone is no different than choosing an auto mechanic based on cost alone. Sure, he may maintain or fix your vehicle cheaper. But will your car spend all the time in the shop instead of on the road?
The first consideration is 'power'. Do they have the capacity to carry your traffic and provide adequate performance? Many hosting companies will advertise that they have tremendous bandwidth and hundreds of servers. They're usually telling the truth.
But there's a difference between existing capacity and usable capacity. If they also host thousands of other websites with millions of visitors each day the available or free capacity will be substantially lower. A large pickup truck may be able to tow 5,000 pounds., but not if it's already carrying 4,999.
Be certain to ask about available capacity, and have the prospective company prove it with reliable data. If you can't interpret the data they provide, find someone to help you do so.
Next, and a very close 2nd, is reliability. A lot of power is worthless if it goes down frequently. Outages are an expected part of business. Even Google and Microsoft suffer downtime now and then. The difference is, it happens rarely and they have fail-over plans. This means, if their site/system does go down it's either back up again in a flash, or you never see the outage because a backup system kicks in immediately and seamlessly.
Be certain to grill the company closely about their up time. They'll often claim 99.6%, or some such figure. But, like the on-time figures of the airlines, those numbers can be shaded by adjusting the definition of 'up time'. What matters to you is whether your visitors will be able to access your site at any time of the day or night they may want to.
Learn what systems, both technical and human, they have set up to deal with failures of all sorts. Servers can go down, networks can fail, hard disks can become defective and lose data even when the other components continue to work fine. The result is YOUR site is unavailable, which is the only thing that matters to you. The web hosting company should be able to handle all of that and have your website up again right away.
Last, but not least, is security. With the continuing growth of viruses and spam, you need to know that the web hosting company you select has many ways to deal with them. This means a good technical plan and staff who are knowledgeable in handling with those issues. The old saying: 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' is more true here than anywhere else.
All these factors are central to finding a web hosting company that can provide the services you need. After those criteria are satisfied by a number of candidates, then you can start narrowing them down by price.
