But how do you HONESTLY know `which is the finest web host?

To begin with, you need to break it down to what you need, which is either 3 families of hosting: Shared web hosting, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting or dedicated web hosting.

But you are most likely after shared hosting, which is entry and medium level hosting for small to medium sites. Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting and Dedicated server hosting are both more expensive but can handle the resource demands on more huge sites.

The Best Web Host's Control Panel:

This is the display that will let you tweak your site settings and even view your visitor statistics, such as which web site they came from, which country they are in and some other details. Without this, everything becomes 20 times harder. Creating an email account to use will suddenly take an hour of research instead of 20 easy seconds and will suddenly necessitate almost programmer level skill requirements without this simple interface. Your Control Panel makes doing any of this, easy for absolutely anyone. Only go with hosts offering ?cPanel? (or possibly even, ?DirectAdmin?). If they don't offer these, look somewhere else.

The Best Web Host's Support:

Everyone wants decent web hosting support that will answer their questions fast. But if you are paying $3 a month, you can't expect support that's going to be that good. But some support should be available. Check if they have a phone number to call (most won't ? which isn't necessary a bad thing), but if they have a ?Live Support? chat button, that's a great plus, and a very valuable thing to have available to you in case you need to contact them quickly.

The Best Web Host's Uptime and Reliability

If they are clearly not offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, look somewhere else. Downtime is aggravating and costly for anyone advertising their websites. Web travelers that come to your site when it's down, will be very turned off to to returning. The better way to learn of of their reliability is to read reviews and other people's views. However a fast way to test speed (but not quite dependable) is to see how fast the web host's own web page loads up for you, which can give you an sign of what kind of speed your site can expect.

The Best Web Host's Free Scripts

If the web hosting company you want to run with is using cPanel, they will very often provide you with over 50+ free easily installable scripts through an addon known as ?Fantastico?. This is quite useful, as it holds entire e-commerce shopping carts, CMS systems, forum software and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not absolutely required, but certainly comes in useful.

The Best Web Host's Per Month Pricing

Now if you are like the majority of people. You want good value, and don't want to use up a lot of money on web hosting. Web Hosting has become a ?commodity? item with plenty of competition. You can even find hosts offering hosting for a measly $3 a month. However, you can expect downtime and slowness and emotional distress with these confusingly cheap hosts. End result, not worth saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than chips hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that's over 3 times the amount of our $2 counterparts. But this means the web host can afford to give you good support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and actually run fast.

In reality, you TRULY pay far more with a super-cheap web host because of downtime, unusual slowness, lost visitors and lost revenue, poor support, and your own frustration when you check and see your website is down and your host is out of reach to help ? or don't offer any. Web hosting is really something that will attack you in the behind if you go with the cheapest is best mentality and that is the solid truth.