First, look for reviews by customers like yourself. You will be able to very quickly discover which hosts to stay away from, and which hosts you may be interested in learning more about. Try to determine who provides hosting for the sites you visit most online. That way, you'll have an idea of how different load times affect sites, and things like that. Other people can steer you in the right direction, but take each opinion with a grain of salt. Most hosting companies have affiliate programs where they pay people to recruit for them.
Contact companies you're interested in. If they only have email support, you should see that as a red flag. Whatever you're doing with your site, if you cannot reach your host in the case of down time, you are going to be very upset. You need to determine whether you can talk to a live person at your host at any time. Make sure you can reach them by phone, email and even physical address. That lets you know that they take customer service seriously, and that if there is a problem you have a better chance of getting it resolved quickly.
Determine whether the host plans to put ads on your site. This should only happen with free hosting, and is in fact an incentive to stay away from free hosts. If you do go with a free host, make sure that you check out what kinds of ads will be seen on your site. You don't want to have a site for children and end up with a lot of ads for adult entertainment, for example.
Ask about bandwidth and downtime. Every company will promise 99% uptime, but that is not always accurate. Try to get a better idea of when the site might be down. Ask when the last downtime was. As for bandwidth, find out how much bandwidth you get with the plan you're interested in. Find out whether you can pay for more bandwidth when you get to that point. Typically, you should always get more bandwidth than you think you might need. That way, your site can run smoothly and seamlessly.
After reading this article, you should be better able to select a web host for your site. You might want to just host it anywhere, but if you read over the information here you'll discover why you simply can leave nothing to change. Make the time to fully investigate hosting companies until you find one that is a good fit for you financially and otherwise.
