Web hosting is a vital part of your online business. Whether your business is small or big, if you have business web site, you need to have good web site hosting with high up time & reliability. If your web site hosting performance is poor and if it has poor response time, more than half of your visitors will close your web site.

Selecting good hosting provider is an important work. There are many factors involved to consider while choosing web site hosting service provider. Based on my experience, I am going to explain you some of the important factors.

Web Hosting Location

Web site hosting location plays vital role for your web site response time. You should select a location where majority of your customers stays.

Let's take an example. Let's say you are having a company in India and you sell your product in USA. Majority of your customers are from USA. There is simply no point of hosting your web site in India. Don't host your site in India because it's cheap. Since you have all customers from USA, hosting your site in USA will give you super fast response time.

So you got the point. Always select the hosting location where majority of your customers are.

Flexible Control

Your web hosting provider should give you full control to install whatever you want in your hosting environment. Some of the hosting providers don't give control to install application in their shared hosting service.

For example, you might need ioncube loader (php module) to run your application or say you want to change some of the php configuration setting to get better performance for your site. You should be able to do all this in your hosting environment. Web hosting provider should give you control over all settings.

There should be an at least 99% up time. This is something that you cannot decide before joining. Some hosting providers do provide SLA for up time. Some don't provide SLA that doesn't mean they are not giving high up time. You simply need to find out the up time. Search on Google, read some review and find out the performance history of the company. If there are too many bad reviews, don't go for that hosting company.

SSH Access

SSH makes much of the work simpler. In dedicated web hosting, you will definitely get SSH access but what if you don't have budget for dedicated web hosting and you still want SSH access. There are some hosting providers in the market which gives you SSH access in shared hosting environment too. SSH makes your life easier. If you are an advanced player, you should always select the hosting with SSH access.

Disk Space & Bandwidth

Now a day, hardware has become so cheap that many hosting providers give unlimited disk space and unlimited data transfer limit. You will always get much more disk space then your need but still this is an important factor. Always make sure that you will have enough disk space and band width to serve your future web traffic.

I hope this article will help you to make your decision regarding web hosting service provider.