With thousands of website hosting companies in the market it can be difficult if not impossible to know which really provide a good hosting solution at a reasonable price.

It is important that you find a company that not only meets your needs now but also your possible future needs. On day one you can be on their basic service but later you can migrate to the more advanced services if necessary. What you want to avoid, if at all possible, is having to move hosting companies later.

Things you want to avoid are:

* downtime
* slow network
* unreasonable limitations on bandwidth &/or disk space
* excessive restrictions on email addresses and FTP uploads
* poor customer support

So it is best to avoid the smaller, cheaper web hosting companies.

When choosing between website hosting providers you should look for:

Finances:- How long has the company been in business? How many customers do they have? If you're running very critical operations, you can't afford to be with a hosting company that may not be in business in a few months.

Network/hardware:- Does the company own the infrastructure or it is reselling someone else's? Of course the former is preferable. Does the company provide information on its network and the redundancy built-in? Is there a guarantee regarding network availability or network uptime?

Help and Support:- You should expect support 24/7 via various channels which should include a toll free phone number. Do they specify a time for responding to problems? Whilst this is always important it is critical when company and user are in different time zones.

Scope of Service:- Even the basic hosting services should enable you to set-up and run a website or blog easily without restrictions. Ideally this should include:

* unlimited bandwidth
* unrestricted disk space
* unlimited email addresses/FTP accounts
* uptime Guarantee
* Cpanel for managing everything
* applications for website creation, blog set-up etc.
* reports on activity (visitors, page views etc.).

If a company meets all the above criteria I would still recommend some web search based on what you intend to do. I had a problem with one well known hosting company where a Wordpress blog would not work correctly, searching the web showed that others had the same issue. Had I realized this at the outset I would not have gone with that company.

The basic hosting services are all based on shared servers, where multiple users compete for resources. This can be a problem if the hosting company loads too many accounts on to one server. Also of course each user can be affected by what other users do.

Once your site gets too big for shared hosting the next step is VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting. This is a way of putting multiple accounts on one server and splitting the server (cpu resources, memory, and hard drive space) so that all of these accounts act "like" their own server. VPS hosting allows hosting companies to provide a service offering many of the advantages of a dedicated server at much lower cost.

Ultimately your site might become too busy for VPS hosting at which point you would want a dedicated server. Here you actually have a physical server (which you may get to select the specification of) for your sole use.

Whilst getting to the point of needing a dedicated server might be some way in the future, if your chosen website hosting company is an established stable organization and provides a good basic service with an upgrade path, your life as a webmaster will be much easier.