But how do you in FACT know `which is the most unsurpassed web host?
Initially you need to break it down to what you need, which is either three types of web hosting: Shared, VPS, or Dedicated web hosting.
Firstly, 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 Hosting are both more pricey but can handle the resource demands on more large sites.
An A-Grade Web Host's Control Panel:
This is the online software 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 need almost programmer level skill requirements without this easy 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 elsewhere.
An A-Grade Web Host's Support:
Anyone looking online for a host, wants top web hosting support that will answer their questions quickly. But if you are paying $2 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 contact 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 practical thing to have available to you in case you need to contact them with speed due to any problems.
An A-Grade Web Host's Reliability and Uptime
If they are simply not offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, look elsewhere. Downtime is stressing and costly for anyone advertising their web sites. Visitors that come to your site when it's down, will be very turned off to coming back. The only way to know of their reliability is to read reviews and other people's outlooks. However a speedy way to test speed (but not quite reliable) 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.
An A-Grade Web Host's Free Scripts
If the web hosting company you want to go with is using cPanel, they will very often provide you with over 50+ free easy-to-install scripts through an attachment known as ?Fantastico?. This is amazingly useful, as it holds entire e-commerce shopping carts, blogging software, forum scripts and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not absolutely required, but certainly comes in useful.
An A-Grade Web Host's Per Month Pricing
Now if you are like most people. You want good value, and don't want to use up your bank. Web Hosting has become a ?commodity? item with plenty of competition. You can even find web hosts offering hosting for a measly $3 a month. However, you can expect downtime and slowness and emotional distress with these cheaper-than-chips web hosts. End result, not worth saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than lollies hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that's over 4 times the fee of our 2 dollar comparison. But this means the host can actually afford to give you top support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and also run with speed.
Believe it or not, 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 are very slow to respond. Website hosting is truly something that will attack you in the behind if you go with the spend-nothing is best mentality and that is in fact the solid truth.