1. Check the Speed & Reliability
Web hosting services should be reliable. Hence make sure that the Commercial Web hosting service provider that you choose is offering you 99% uptime. Most of the service providers promise about 99% but you have to check thoroughly before accepting their services.
2. Check actual Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)
Data transfer is amount of data transferred from your site to the visitor’s machines. Some of the service providers offer unlimited data transfer, but you have to check carefully whether they stick to their word or not.
After exceeding particular data transfer limit most of the service providers ask for additional charges.
Here is an example to measure bandwidth requirement of your website.
Ex: if your website has 10 pages, with each page having an average size of 1000kb size with 20 visits/ day, then data transfer needed for a month will be (10x1000x20x30 =6000000 KB) 5860 MB . Most of the vendors who offer free unlimited data transfer actually do it only up to limited amount and will often demand additional charges later. So check your data transfer requirement and choose a web hosting provider accordingly. Also keep in mind that your traffic requirements will grow with time
3. Ask for Disk space
Web hosting companies offer “unlimited disk space” as an important feature of their services. Most of the websites require disk space less than 100 MB.
According to the above mentioned example of a 10 page website with 1000kb individual pages , the average disk space needed will be (10×1000=10000kb) i.e. approx 10MB. From this you can calculate the memory requirement of your website and hire a good custom web hosting service accordingly.
4. Technical support
Some website hosting companies promise 24/7 technical support. Before accepting a web hosting service check-out whether they are applicable to Sundays, Saturday evenings and other holidays too.
And also double check whether the support comes from genuine people or else the sales representative may cater you a handful of technical problems rather than a technical team.
5. Carefully review all the technical features
If you plan for website development in ASP.NET then you have no other choice than using windows hosting server. Before choosing the services closely analyze your entire requirements. Check whether your servers are compatible with your technical requirements like FTP, PHP, Perl, SSL, telnet, MYSQL, MS SQL, and ASP.NET.
If you are planning to have e-commerce functionality on your website, then you need to check it for SSL. The server that you prefer has to be compatible with the shopping carts that you choose.
6. Review Emails, Auto responders, POP3, Mail Forwarding offerings
As a website owner you may require domain name based e-mail ids. So list out all your requirements like forwarding the mails, controlling the mail accounts, and auto replies before contacting the right web hosting company.
7. You might require a Control Panel
Control panel can be used to manage the entire web content of a website and other aspects easily. If your website is fully dynamic & needs to be updated on a regular basis, then you require a good control panel to update stuffs on a regular basis.
8. Domain Hosting and Sub domains
If you are planning to sell your web space to multiple sub domains or host more than one domain , then you should look for web hosting providers who are catering your needs.
9. Server type
The server type is also an import point to be noted while selecting Commercial Web Hosting services. there are lot of server types available to choose. ex: Apache HTTP Server , NGINX , Microsoft IIS , Litespeed . Depending upon the requirements you can choose the best server from various choices .
10. Resellers
There are so many web development companies who don’t have any hosting services but do reseller web hosting. While choosing such service providers, check out the credibility of the reseller web hosting company that you have chosen. Because fraudsters may disappear after selling and later create a lot of problems.
