When you have created or wish to create a website the choice of a web hosting company is a fundamental decision and it is important you make the right choice, in terms of how it will work for your particular website.
Nowadays browsing through forums or reviews really is not much help, as there are so many paid reviews that are not objective at all. In addition, you will notice that people post many more comments on forums when they have had a negative experience than when they were happy with the service, thus it is hard to find out whether a certain web hosting company is any good at all.
Many companies outsource freelance writers to write positive reviews for them, this means that these are not original comments from users, and the forums are not reliable.
However, there are ways to find out whether or not a web hosting company is a good one. The first step to take is to determine how long a web hosting company has been on the market. You should choose a hosting company that has been in the industry for at least two or three years, if you want to be sure they are reliable and competitive. The next step you should take is check how reliable the company is as far as the server uptime is concerned. The third step is to check how good the web hosting company is with customer service issues.
In order to find out how popular a web hosting company is, you can install Searchstatus, a plug-in for Firefox, as this will rank all websites you visit. You should be looking for over 200,000 visitors for a website to be highly ranked.
However, the Alexa ranking is not really sufficient, as popularity of a web hosting company does not necessarily mean it is reliable, this is why you should also check the reliability of the company. Netcraft will help you determine this issue, as it will delve deeper into how well the web hosting company works.
Netcraft can give you monthly reports on which web hosting company had the best uptime in the month. It measures issues such as failed requests, outage, response time and other elements. Netcraft also lists the top ten most reliable companies of the month. If you want to find a valid web hosting company check the Netcraft listings, and find out which ones have been in the top ten ratings for longer.
You should then proceed in checking how a web hosting company deals with its customers by using Better Business Bureau, which will give you a company’s rating using certain criteria. Amongst these are how many complaints a company has received from users and how it has dealt with these complaints. Avoid having to deal with those popular companies that have a bad history as far as customer service is concerned.
The Better Business Bureau can only be used in the USA and Canada, so you will not find any European based companies rated with this server.
About the author: Shaina
Shaina is the co-founder and Chief Editor of Websoulz. She is a full-time writer/designer. And has been writing articles and tutorials for the designer community. If you want to connect with her, simply follow her on twitter @websoulz
Websoulz is a fresh platform to discover new and exciting web and graphic designing tips, tricks, different techniques, awesome examples and practices. Designing is our passion and here on Websoulz we want to share it with all. 
A very nice post, indeed web hosting is the primary constituent when you are starting a website. People rarely care about the web hosts but it is one of the most important parameter in the performance of website. I appreciate your post with such informative material. I just subscribed to your post and awaiting for more good posts on web hosting over the coming days. Thanks
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Nancy
Great article for beginners like me, I’m planning on creating a site for myself so hosting is important for me.