How to choose a web hosting company:

Choosing the right web hosting company is vital to your company and website.  Generally speaking you don't need to know too much technical information, but there are a few things you should find out before choosing a host.  

At a minimum, the most important things for any website are:

• amount of storage space (we recommend 3,000MB minimum)
• amount of data transfer (50GB minimum is best)
• # of email accounts (usually not a problem as most hosts offers hundreds, thousands or even unlimited)
• ftp access (usually look for more than 1 account)

After those basic features there are a few advanced items you may be interested in depending on the size and nature of your site.  These include:

• databases (MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server)
• PERL, PHP
• .htaccess

If you are just looking to do a basic site then any of the companies listed in our comparison chart should suffice.  They all offer a good amount of storage, bandwidth, etc.  Some offer more 'other' features including MySQL, scripts, etc... which can be seen in the 'Other' column.  

Several webhosts offer free Fantastico scripts which automate the process of installing many scripts including bulletin boards, forums, blogs, chats, e-commerce stores and more.  This is great for beginners that don't have all the programming knowledge of more advanced users.

More details on important things to look for:

Reliability and speed of access:   Look for a minimum uptime of 99%, though 99.5% is of course even better.  The host should provide some sort of refund (ie.  prorated refund or discount) if it falls below that figure.  

Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth):  Data transfer (sometimes loosely referred to as "traffic" or "bandwidth") is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site.  If you host a lot of images or other large files you may need a slightly higher bandwidth. Each time someone downloads or even just views a photo or .pdf file or whatever on your site it eats into your bandwidth.

Technical support:  Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (often abbreviated 24/7), all year around?  Never use a host that does not offer 24/7 support.  Before signing up with a host it's a good idea to send them some questions via email at 'odd' times (midnight on a Wednesday, early on a Saturday morning...) in order to see how responsive they are.

FTP, PHP, Perl CGI-BIN access, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH crontabs:   If you are going to be doing anything more than basic .html pages you should really look for a host that offers all of these features.  ".htaccess" is needed for such simple features as customizing your error pages or rewriting URLs.

SSL (secure server), MySQL, Shopping Cart:  If you are planning on doing any sort of business through your website, you will want to choose a host that offers these features.  And definitely look to see if they have fantastico scripts which can automatically install shopping cart software.

Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding:  If you have your own site, you would probably want to have email addresses at your own domain, like sales@yourdomain.com, etc. Also, does the host allow you to have a catch-all email account that allows anyname@yourdomain.com to wind up being routed to you?  Can you setup autoresponders, forwarding, etc...

Control Panel:  How easy is it to use?  Most webhosts offer a demo where you can test it out.  This is important since some are more complicated than others.