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

At first, you need to break it down to what you need, which is either 3 types of web hosting: Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, or Dedicated Hosting.

You are most likely after shared hosting, which is entry and medium level hosting for small to medium sites. VPS Hosting and also dedicated web hosting are both more pricey but can handle the resource demands on more large sites.

An Excellent Web Hosting Provider's Control Panel:

This is the interface 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 25 times more difficult. 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 skills without this simple interface. Your Control Panel makes doing any of this, easy for absolutely anyone. Only go with web hosting companies offering ?cPanel? (or possibly even, ?DirectAdmin?). If they don't offer these, don't go forward with them.

An Excellent Web Hosting Provider's Support:

Anyone looking online for a host, wants top web hosting support that will answer their questions quickly. But if you are paying $3 per month, you can't expect support that's going to be that great. But some support should hopefully be available. Check if they have a number to call (most won't ? which isn't that much of a bad thing), but if they have a ?Live Support? chat button, that's a great plus, and a very useful thing to have available to you in case you need to contact them fast.

An Excellent Web Hosting Provider's Reliability and Uptime

If they are clearly not offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, don't go forward with them. Downtime is agitating and costly for anyone advertising their sites. Viewers that come to your site when it's down, will be very turned off to to returning. The only way to know of their reliability is to read reviews and other people's opinions. However a speedy 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 hint of what kind of speed your site can expect.

An Excellent Web Hosting Provider's Free Scripts

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

An Excellent Web Hosting Provider'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 loads of competition. You can even find hosts offering hosting for a measly $2 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 popcorn Internet web hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that's over 5 times the fee of our 2 dollar 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 also run with speed.

In reality, you WILL 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 truly something that will bite you in the behind if you go with the cheapest is best mentality and that is in fact the truth.