Step Four: Selecting a Web Host

Reliability

This refers to the percentage of time the hosting server is working and displaying your website. Unfortunately, these percentages are often reported only by the host company, so their accuracy should not be taken at face value. A good rule of thumb is that if the host offers a money-back guarantee, you should feel a higher level of confidence than if you are force to commit to a contract period even as short as three months.

Access to support personnel - All hosting companies probably have support personnel. The important question is how easily can you get in contact with them and how soon can you get help with your problems. Look for a support page on the host's website and see what is offered. Test the service before you buy!

Server hard drive space - An average web page is 10K to 50k. Pictures and other graphics usually range on size from about 1K to 25K. This means that if you have a 10 to 15 page website with 2-5 graphics on each page, you will need 120K to about 3MB (3,000K or 3,000,000 bytes) to save your website on a server. Even if you have a much large website with many more graphics, your website should be able to fit comfortably onto about 10MB of hard disk space. When web hosts offer you 400MB of hard disk space, they do so knowing that the vast majority of users will not come close to using all of that space. Therefore, in most cases, offers of more than 10-25MB of space are made mostly to impress prospective customers who really do not understand how much they need. It just sounds good.

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