Your website is your most important online asset and it is important that you get a good web hosting company to launch it. Of course, these days there are a lot of web hosting companies claiming to be the best in the industry but it is up to you to investigate and select a genuine web hosting company.

Many such firms are charging very high prices for their services, while others apparently seem to be offering services at very low prices. But you have to be careful with the latter because you might be getting inferior grade service for a low price.

This is something that you might not like because you will, most probably, not want to compromise with the quality of services that are being offered to you for a low price. What you would actually want is good service at a reasonable price; and you should do extensive research about the companies that are authentic and offer services at apt prices.

Some tips on choosing a good web hosting company are listed below:

• Before you approach a web hosting company, you should first assess your needs and be clear as to what you want. Otherwise the provider might offer you features that you actually do not need for your website, which eventually raises the cost of the service provided. Always opt for only those features which are necessary for you.

• Go for a dedicated service provider only for hosting professional websites. You don’t need to opt for a hosting company for any personal non-commercial website. For example, if you want to have a personal website, where you would want to put some family photographs or information, the best thing for you to do would be to find out if your internet service provider offers you any free web space. Many ISPs do provide space for personal websites or for uploading photographs or personal information. You don’t need to spend money on expensive web hosting companies for personal websites. Web hosting companies are a must when you want a professional website to be hosted because they are dedicated to providing the best services for your website and making it a grand success in the online community.

• While selecting your hosting provider you should always check on the uptime guarantee that it offers. The hosting company should give you long hours of uptime because offline websites and websites that always have their servers down will turn away visitors from your site and will also rank low in the search engine listings.

• A web hosting company that has a proven track record for good performance and also for providing you instant assistance can always be trusted for good services.

• A web hosting company that provides virtual hosting services is preferred. Virtual hosting is a very economical feature by which the hosting company allows multiple domain names. If you have more than one website, you should opt for this feature because it will handle requests to all the sites without you having to pay any additional cost for the different websites.

• The hosting provider should provide archiving services so that you do not loose any data during any eventuality.

• Your web hosting service provider should offer SFTP and SSH for enhanced security of your websites. These protocols are used over telnet and ftp protocols as they encrypt the data while it gets transferred over the web.

• Your web hosting firm should offer good support for CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts which enable you to add interesting dynamic elements to your website. You might want to use only text in your website for the present, but always leave some room for CGI elements like shopping carts or guest books.

• The operating system of the web hosting service provider should support the software that you use on your website. For a basic website, this might not matter, but if you wish to have blogs, search engines, community forums or other complex features, the host operating system should always be compatible. The server operating system also determines the database server types that are accessible to you.

• Pay special attention to bandwidth charges. Some hosting service providers might say that they are offering you unlimited bandwidth, but you might be actually paying some extra fee for multimedia features. Web hosting service providers have innumerable plans for extra bandwidth charges, which you have to carefully calculate to see that you are not paying more than the exact amount.

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