What to look for?

A bird's eye view

When searching for a web host, beside all the technical details and all the advertisement, you should also pay attention to a couple of things that aren't technical related.

You can start with looking from a bird's eye view at their website. Try to determine if they are a company whom you can trust, a company that values its customers. If their website seems to be slow, then chances are so will yours. Look at the pages and the website as a whole. If the website is organized, professional looking and there are no missing pages or broken links, there's a very good chance that you'll get a professional hosting service from them.

Another thing worth checking is the customer support. Is helping their customers one of their main goals? Look for toll-free numbers, 24/7 customer support, feedback from other customers, F.A.Qs, knowledge database at last but not least support forums. The support forums are a great source of answers and opinions from current clients. Check out the activity there. When comparing web hosts it is important not only to consider the price difference or the bandwidth offered but also making sure your website remains online and in case a problem with your website arises, you can reach someone that can help you with it in a timely manner.

The Features

Standard features.
After you have determined your needs and you decided that they are a reliable company, let's look at their offer's technical details and understand what they stand for. Here is a list of some of the standard features that all hosting packages have in common:

• Storage capacity. It is the amount of disk space that you can use. For 95% of the websites, the size of any hosting package is more than enough. Because with the new hard drives getting bigger and bigger, web hosts can now offer large amounts of disk space.
• Bandwidth. As explained before bandwidth is very important because once you reach the limit, you're site becomes either inaccessible or you are being charged very high rates for the extra bandwidth. For example, you can pay $7.99 to get 400 GB of data transfer and be charged $3-4 for any additional 1 GB over that limit.
• 24/7 Customer Support. Let's hope this is a feature that you will not use, but when bad luck strikes, you will want someone to talk to and quick. Look for toll free telephone numbers.
• Uptime. 99.9% uptime is good, 99.999% is perfect. The web hosts should also monitor the servers 24/7 and provide protection from DDOS attacks.
• Email features. If you have an email client like Outlook for example, you can use it to get your emails from the server (POP3, IMAP) as well as send them via the server (SMTP). See if you can get unlimited Email Accounts and Email Forwarding, Spam Protection and a web mail option (a web based client like: Horde, Squirrel Mail) in case you don't use an email client software or you just want to check your email from an Internet Café.
• Free domain. What was in the past considered a bonus has now become a standard feature. You should get a free domain name when signing up for a 12 months or a 24 months contract.
• CGI-BIN support. This is more of a legacy programming language but there are still around quite a few CGI scripts and websites running them.
• PHP, Perl, Phyton support. Some of the most popular technologies used in website development.
• Databases. MySQL and postgreSQL are two reliable databases types. Normally if you have a simple site you will not need them, but think big!
• SSI support. Server Side Includes (SSI) is a set of HTML tags that allow dynamic content on a web page. SSI is most typically used to "include" the same file on numerous pages, thus simplifying updates. Ask your programmers if they need it.
• Content Management. You will need a way to access and modify website settings, to see traffic results, reports, logs, etc. cPanel and Joomla! are two popular and user friendly CMS' (Content Management Systems).
• FTP Access. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is used, as the name suggests, for transferring files. You will use this to upload your website files to the web host server.
• Add-on domains and sub-domains. Add-on domains make it possible for you to have an additional website (with email) on the same hosting account. This is great if you decide to build another website and you're not using all your bandwidth and storage space. As for sub-domains, you should be able to create unlimited sub-domains. Sub-domain example: if the website is called www.myhosting.com, a sub-domain can be the following address: www.members.myhosting.com.
• Shopping cart(s). A useful feature for e-commerce websites.

The Price.
Depending on the hosting plan, prices can vary from $3-4 (shared hosting) to $100 (dedicated hosting). But here are some aspects that you should consider, no matter if you're looking for shared hosting server or a dedicated server:

• Setup fee. You should not pay a setup fee, especially if you are signing up for 12 months or more.
• The "real" price. Usually the advertised price is the price with a 12 or 24 months contract, so if you are planning to sign up for less than that, the "real" monthly fee is going to be a little more expensive.
• Money back. Do they have a 30 days Money Back Guarantee? They'd better have one, unless they have something to hide.

Additional features
There is a fierce competition out there, so every web hosting company tries to add to their packages bonuses to make the offer more appealing. Some of the bonuses are:

• Free software. When you sign up you will get an application or a package of applications for free, for which you usually have to pay;
• Free templates. Web templates that you can use to create your website or sometimes not the templates themselves but the access to a free, easy to use website builder/wizard.
• Technologies. Because some of the web development technologies, like JSP (Java Servlet Pages) are not widely used, JSP support is not a standard feature but it's a nice add-on to have in case you will have a website developed in JSP.
• Media support. Video and audio streaming support is needed if you want to have videos or audios running on your website.
• Flash / Shockwave support. Flash and Shockwave are two popular animation software programs from Macromedia.
• Dedicated IP address. Having your own IP address is useful and even needed for some websites setups.
• Freebies. Free scripts installed and ready to use, like forums, auto-responders, mailing lists, etc.