If you want to set up a personal blog, a company website, or even a multi-million dollar social network, choosing the right hosting company for your website is paramount. Without laying this essential foundation, your internet site may experience frequent downtime, or worse still you could lose all of your important data.

With the five tips below I will show you how to make the right choice when it comes to choosing a company that can responsibly manage your website or blog.

Tip #1 - What is their advertising campaign?

If you head over to your local bookstore and go to the magazine section you will probably find a few magazines targeted to the web developer crowd. Often in these magazines there will be advertisements for web hosting companies that flaunt their impressive stats such as "99.9% server uptime" and others.

If a company is not running a legitimate operation, they would likely not be able to afford this type of advertising and also the magazine would pull the ad immediately if they began to receive a lot of negative feedback about this company. Any hosting company that you find this way will probably be a very safe bet for your business, because the more customers they have the more they have to keep their servers up 24/7 and put in place proper data backup procedures.

Tip #2 - What are other people saying about them?

One of the best ways to check and see if your web hosting company has a good track record is to see what kinds of reviews other people are giving them. Bring up any popular search engine and type in your host's name with the word "review" afterwards and see if the feedback is positive or negative.

Tip #3 - How much does their shared hosting cost?

While the cost of website hosting has gone down dramatically in recent times and you likely can find a reliable hosting company for under 7 dollars per month for a small site, there is a scam that some shady hosting companies use which is to overload the amount of shared hosting accounts.

For your small monthly fee you may get a large amount of space and bandwidth, but the host counts on the fact that you are only going to use a small percent of it, so they will put more shared accounts on a single server than the server could handle if everyone used up all of their allocated capacity.

This means that with this type of account if someone else who had a shared account went over their bandwidth limit, it could bring your website down. Not a safe bet for someone who wants constant uptime.

Tip #4 - What kind of guarantee do they offer?

Even to this day the website hosting industry remains semi-anonymous, and there are a great deal of sob stories about people who lost all of their valuable data and literally their entire business overnight. But if your hosting company has a plan to take your money and run, it is not likely that they will offer a refund policy and money-back guarantee that is fair for customers.

Check to see what your hosting company's policy for refunds is, and if they hold themselves to strict measures of transparency and accountability than it is probably a reliable company.

Tip #5 - Do you feel safe trusting them with your business?

Sometimes the most important tip you could follow is your gut feeling about whether or not this is a competent company. If they have a poorly designed website and no customer service then maybe it is not a safe bet for you.

And even if they do have all the bells and whistles on their website, if they do not return your email requests in a timely fashion then it may turn out that they are not a safe and reliable web hosting company.