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

To begin with, you need to break it down to what you need, which is either three types of web hosting: Shared, VPS, or Dedicated web hosting.

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

An Excellent Web Hosting Provider'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 10 times more difficult. Creating an email account to use will suddenly take an hour of research instead of 20 easy seconds and will suddenly require almost programmer level skill requirements without this smart interface. Your Control Panel makes doing any of this, easy for absolutely anyone. Only go with web hosts offering ?cPanel? (or possibly even, ?DirectAdmin?). If they don't offer these, move on.

An Excellent Web Hosting Provider's Support:

Everyone wants good web hosting support that will answer their questions with haste. But if you are paying $2 per MONTH, you can't expect support that's going to be that good. But some support should hopefully be available. Check if they have a contact number to call (most won't ? which isn't often a bad thing), but if they have a ?Live Support? chat button, that's a bonus plus, and a very helpful thing to have present to you in case you need to contact them fast.

An Excellent Web Hosting Provider's Uptime and Reliability

If they are clearly not offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, move on. Downtime is frustrating and costly for anyone advertising their web sites. Visitors that come to your site when it's down, will be very turned off to to returning. The better way to know of their reliability is to read reviews and other people's opinions. However a fast way to test speed (but not quite reliable) is to see how fast the host's own web page loads up for you, which can give you an indication of what kind of speed your site will be load with.

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 easily installable scripts through an attachment known as ?Fantastico?. This is very useful, as it includes entire e-commerce shopping carts, CMS systems, forum scripts and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not necessary, but certainly comes in useful.

An Excellent Web Hosting Provider's Per Month Pricing

Now if you are like most people. You want good value, and don't want to use up your budget. Web Hosting has become a ?commodity? item with loads of competition. You can even find web hosts offering hosting for a measly $2 a month. However, you can expect downtime and slowness and emotional distress with these cheaper-than-chips web hosts. End result, not worth the hassle of saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than chips web hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that's over 5 times the fee of our $2 comparison. But this means the web host can actually afford to give you top support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and actually run with speed.

Believe it or not, you will really 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. Website hosting is truly something that will get you in the behind if you go with the spend-nothing is best mentality and that is the truth.