It is not wise to just go to a random web hosting company site and sign up without taking time to do research. Many web hosting companies will not offer a full refund as stated in their TOS so you must always do research before making payment for the web hosting service. As you do research on different web hosting companies, you will find that each of them offer web hosting plans that varies in the features such as amount of disk space, number of email address allowed, bandwidth/data transfer, operating system platform, and apps.

Basic web hosting plans may allow up to 10 email addresses while higher end web hosting plans will allow up to 250 email addresses. Usually, you can choose from 2 types of operating systems including Windows and Linux. Linux web hosting plan is cheaper because it is open source. Windows web hosting plan is more expensive because of the Windows license fee. Linux plans are suitable for hosting CMS like WordPress and Joomla. Windows plans are used for hosting apps that rely on Windows OS to run well such as Umbraco software, and nop Commerce shopping cart.

You must make sure that the web hosting plan that you choose can accommodate all the interactivity on your website. For example, if your website is coded based on a programming language like PHP and Java, you must make sure that the web hosting plan supports these scripts. The web hosting plan should support shopping carts if you want to set up an e-commerce store. If you want to set up a blog or forum, you have to make sure that the web hosting plan offers an auto installer that allows you to install the type of blog or forum according to your needs.

You will find that every web hosting plans states how much disk space and bandwidth it offers. Disk space is the space where you can store your website files. Websites with lots of images, videos and podcasts will require a hosting plan with large disk space. The bandwidth refers to the amount of data transfer that is allowed. The more traffic your site receives, the higher the bandwidth or data transfer you need.

Unlimited web hosting plan claims to offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth. This means that it has not set any specific limit for the disk space and bandwidth. It doesn’t mean that there is no limit to the disk space and bandwidth as the description states. They will contact you to upgrade the hosting if your website is getting far too many traffic that your plan can accommodate. It is important to find a web hosting company that offer professional technical support especially if you are a newbie and it is the first website that you launch.

The support provided by the web hosting company can be in various methods such as telephone, live chat and ticketing system. You should check the web hosting company site to see if there is a link to the community forum. The community forum is useful if you want immediate attention from the staff to fix some web hosting issues. It is advised that you don’t sign up with the web hosting company f you are not getting any response after contacting the customer support.

Nowadays, many web hosting companies reviews sites have been established to provide webmasters with insights as to which is the best web hosting company to sign up. The established web hosting companies reviews are those that are ranked on the first page in Google search result. Usually, established web hosting review sites are reviews written by the actual paying customers who have used the hosting for several months so they are fit for providing the reviews.

They have carried out a lot of research on each of the web hosting companies that they sign up with. They continuously monitor 10 or more web hosting provides for over a year or in order to give customers accurate reviews of their performance. The web hosting reviews will measure important aspects of the web hosting services including uptime and reliability, loading time, and customer support. They test the customer representative with a few questions in order to post an average response time in the web hosting reviews.

It’s important for small businesses to not opt for the lowest quality web hosting. Check out the details in this review of the cheapest web hosts in Australia.