Start searching online for website hosting, and you will be bombarded with literally hundreds of website hosting companies, all offering competitively priced website hosting services.

So how do you know which one is a good one for your needs?

While many of these hosting companies will look the same on the surface, and will most likely offer you incentives, such as free extras to lure you in, it pays to really check them out and compare the real difference in services they offer.

I’d like to share a little personal experience I had about 18 months ago, which will hopefully open your eyes to the benefits of fining the right hosting partner…
For a number of years I hosted all my websites with one of the big hosting companies, (which will remain unnamed), until they were hit with a server attack, leading to many of my clients websites being hacked. I attempted to contact the hosting company a number of times, which was based in the USA, and I am in Australia, so it was often very hard to even get through to a technical staff member, and sometimes I was on hold for 20 minutes!
I also tried their online support system , but the service wasn’t much better. They could not offer me any resolution, other than for me to fix the hacked sites, and change my password. Sounds easy, except I had 150 client sites to change, which would take up most of my day, and then 3 days later the hosting was hacked again.
The company would not move my site to a more secure server, they would not refund me, they even hung up the phone on me a number of times as there was apparently nothing they could do.

I decided it was time to start moving all the websites to another provider, while in the meantime the original host company began billing me renewals on the hosting, a month earlier than they were due, and without any prior consent. They just automatically billed without my authority!

I contacted the manager who promised the matter would be fixed, and I would be reimbursed, though I never was.

So after this painful and expensive lesson I decided to make sure the next website provider I chose was much better. I ended up moving all the websites to Hostgator, who have been great ever since.

To help you choose, I made a 10 point checklist to help find the best provider:

1. Review the hosting company
Do a search on Google for hosting reviews for that company and see what others have to say about them

2. Read their policy and customer guarantee in regards to the venerability of the servers to any attacks, and find out what plan they have in place if this should ever occur.

3. Review their technical support service before purchasing hosting.
Call the tech support and see how good their service really is, the case you ever require it one day. Find out if they offer local tech support and customer call back, in the even you need to leave a message.

4. Make sure you can understand your tech support staff, and vice versa.
There is nothing worse than being put through to a call centre in India and neither party can understand the problem or solution!

5. Make sure the hosting plan provides all the basic services, including plenty of hosting space, unlimited email accounts, webmail, etc

6. Ensure the hosting package comes with MySQL and PHP capabilities,
as you will require these if your website uses a database (eg, running blogs, shopping carts, etc)

7. Does your hosting provider automatically bill you and do they give you plenty of notice when your hosting is due for renewal.

8. Make sure they do regular back ups of your website.
This is important in case anything goes wrong with their hosting, otherwise your entire website could be lost!

9. Are you paying a fair price.
Most good hosting packages are around the $9 USD monthly fee, and also offer free domain name registration/renewal as part of the standard package.

10. Find out where the hosting is based.
For instance, if your target audience is located in another country, then try and get hosting in that country as this will usually provide you a better connection/download speed for your viewers.

Follow the above advice and hopefully you will have a carefree hosting experience!

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design & Web SEO Coach