But how do you TRULY know `which is the greatest web host?

At the beginning, you need to break it down to what you need, which is either 3 types of web hosting: Shared, VPS, or Dedicated web hosting.

Firstly, you are most likely after shared hosting, which is entry and medium level hosting for small to medium sites. VPS Hosting and also dedicated web hosting are both more pricey but can handle the resource demands on more popular websites.

The Best Web Host's Control Panel:

This is the online software that will let you tweak your site settings and even view your visitor statistics, such as which web site they came from, which country they are in and some other details. Without this, everything becomes 5 times harder. Creating an email account to use will suddenly take an hour of research instead of 20 easy seconds and will suddenly necessitate almost programmer level skill requirements without this easy interface. Your Control Panel makes doing any of this, easy for absolutely anyone. Only go with web hosts offering ?cPanel? (or possibly even, ?DirectAdmin?). If they don't offer these, move on.

The Best Web Host's Support:

Anyone looking online for a host, wants decent web hosting support that will answer their questions quickly. But if you are paying $2 per month, you can't expect support that's going to be that exceptional. But some support should hopefully be available. Check if they have a number to call (most won't ? which isn't that much of a bad thing), but if they have a ?Live Support? chat button, that's a huge plus, and a very practical thing to have present to you in case you need to contact them with speed due to any problems.

The Best Web Host's Reliability and Uptime

If they are not offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, move on. Downtime is stressing and costly for anyone advertising their sites. Web travelers that come to your site when it's down, will be very turned off to coming back. The only way to learn of of their reliability is to read reviews and other people's attitudes. However a fast way to test speed (but not quite dependable) is to see how fast the web host's own web page loads up for you, which can give you an clue of what kind of speed your site can expect.

The Best Web Host's Free Scripts

If the web host you want to consider, is running cPanel, they will very often provide you with over 50+ free easy-to-install scripts through an addon known as ?Fantastico?. This is very useful, as it contains entire e-commerce shopping carts, blogging software, forum software and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not necessary, but certainly comes in handy.

The Best Web Host's Per Month Pricing

Now if you are like most people. You want good value, and don't want to use up a lot of money on web hosting. Web Hosting has become a ?commodity? item with plenty of competition. You can even find hosts offering hosting for a measly $2 a month. However, you can expect downtime and slowness and emotional distress with these confusingly cheap hosts. End result, not worth saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than popcorn hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that's over 5 times the amount of our $2 counterparts. But this means the host can actually afford to give you good support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and actually run quickly.

Believe it or not, you in fact pay far more with a super-cheap web host because of downtime, unusual slowness, lost visitors and lost revenue, poor support, and your own frustration when you check and see your website is down and your host is out of reach to help ? or don't offer any. Web hosting is really something that will get you in the behind if you go with the spend-nothing is best mentality and that is in fact the solid truth.