Finding Hosts

March 22, 2006

So you have a rough estimate of how much space and bandwidth you might need, what kind of support you want, and perhaps a budget. Now you can start looking for the company who you will be giving your hard-earned cash to.

Web Hosts are easy to find; you could just type “website hosting” into Google and you’d get millions of hits, but that isn’t the best way to choose a reliable host that will suit you. You need to look for recommendations, reviews and referrals.

Friends

Friends are often the best source of recommendations, reviews and referrals. If you know someone who has a website already, ask them who their host is and if they’re any good - your friend is the most likely person to provide an honest review.

Reviews

If you don’t know anyone with a website there are plenty of places where people post reviews of their hosts, here are just three:

These sites are particularly handy because they take the experiences of numerous customers and sum them up in a single number which makes determining the best host a doddle.

Recommendations

If you’re active on any online communities already, there’s bound to be someone there you can ask for a hosting recommendation. Just start a thread in the appropriate forum asking who people host with and you’re almost guaranteed a plethora of companies.

Next: Spotting a bad host