Find Reviews

Lookup the company on webhosting forums and on webhosting directories. If you find no reviews about the company or people have had bad experiences, you should look for a different company.

Research the Company

Find information about the companies website. You can do this by doing a whois lookup . You should look at the companies namesever. If a hosting company has the name server ns1.cheaphosting.net, they may just be reselling webhosting and not own their own equipment. Also look at when the domain name was registered, this will give you some information as to how long the company has been in operation.

Pay Monthly

Many web hosting companies offer 2 months free if you pay anually rather than monthly. It may be more expensive, but if you get into problems with the hosting, you can leave the company without sacrificing too much.

Do they keep up to date?

Ask the company to send you a link to their phpinfo page. This will tell you what versions of PHP and Apache they are using (assuming the webserver is apache and they support PHP). You can see the latest releases of PHP here

If your web site is down at 3am in the morning, the last thing you want to do is to write an email to your hosting company which probably won’t get replied to for several hours. Before buying check what the methods of support are. We recommend choosing a hosting company that has;

• Freephone 24/7 Phone Support or 24/7 Live Chat
• Email Support with Pager Support for Emergencies
• Mailing Address Provided

A forum is also a good way of finding out if other people are experiencing problems on the same server. A forum also gives a good indication of how many clients the company has.

Before you part with your money make sure that they have a money back guarantee. If not look for another company. A good hosting company will have a 30 money back guarantee so if you don’t like the service you can get a full refund. (If the company charged you a setup fee, you may not get it back).

Guaranteed Support Hours?

Make sure the company has 24/7 support. No good having no one to talk to when your site is down at 4am.

Guaranteed Uptime?

Some companies will have an uptime guarantee and if it drops below that % they will give you a partial refund. Realistically you won’t find a host with true 100% uptime as this does not allow time for Server Upgrades etc.

Domain names are quite cheap. You can get them for less than $15USD. You purcahse domain names from a registrar. Before purchasing a domain name, make sure that they are ICANN accredited. We reccommend GoDaddy or Namecheap.

Godaddy is very cheap however some users have found their support to have long waiting and response times.

Namecheap currently offer WHOIS protection for free and accepts PayPal. however they are very slightly more expensive than other registrars.

If you exceed your bandwidth or space resrictions some hosts may charge you extra. Some companies charge alot if you go over your bandwidth and some do not. Read the Terms of Service very carefully to find out about any additional fees. Some websites also moniter the CPU usage.

The most common fees are;

• Setup Fees
• Bandwidth Fees

Make sure you know what the cost is before you sign up.

Just a heads up for anyone in the UK that .net magazine has a £30 voucher for Google Adwords this month (Special Google issue). The voucher is unique and expires on the 31/08/07 for new accounts less than 14days old.

.net sells in the USA under the name Web Builder I think and it may or may not have a voucher in that edition.