Shared Hosting Selection Tips

If cost is an issue when you are looking at hosting options then shared hosting is the best value for money option far exceeding the so-called benefits of 'free hosting'

Some shared hosting providers provide outstanding service. It is in a shared hosting provider's best interest to make sure that all the sites being hosted on a server get equal amounts of bandwidth and that none of the sites

implement practices or techniques that are detrimental to the other sites hosting on the same server. These include things such as running scripts that consume too many resources, sending out too many emails in one

specific time period, or even getting too much traffic. A good shared hosting provider will check the servers for such eventualities and quickly suspend or disable the offending account.

If you are therefore thinking of engaging in such practices - think again, since you will just get your site shut down in no time.

How do you know which shared hosting company to go for? It is actually easy enough - the ones that have been in operation for a while all know the ropes. Just make use of a good web hosting review site and search for

reviews of shared hosting providers.

These are useful indicators of customer satisfaction.

Things to watch out for when selecting a web hosting provider are some of the following points:

- Do you require 24x7 support? You might if you are sitting in a different time zone from your hosting provider and YOUR business hours are not their business hours! You might need to urgently resolve technical problems

during your business hours that might actually fall outside of normal business hours for your hosting provider.

- Try and ascertain what the size is of their data center. If you can't glean this from their website or from a web hosting review website, ask them directly. Avoid companies that have only one or two servers. If anything goes

wrong, they won't have a fallback server to provide a quick turnaround.

- Look at the features and benefits provided by the hosting company. Your hosting company should at least provide a control panel, as well as simple access to website statistics, as well as provision for email setups,

managing sub-domains and installing scripts.

- Sometimes a hosting company offers various freebies and special deals to sweeten the deal. Hosting is very competitive and this is a way to get more customers. The benefit is yours since you might get free coupons for pay

per click marketing, or free access to web templates for 3 months - keep your eyes open for these offers and if they are made by a reputable hosting company - go for them!

When looking for shared hosting it is always a good idea to check out the contract fine print. You need to make sure, especially if this is particularly cheap hosting, that there are no hidden costs in the fine print. Examples of

these might include things such as extra bandwidth or hard disk costs, additional costs for 'extra' features such as extra email boxes, or having to pay extra for things such as server side scripting or MySQL databases.