If you do a search in Google for 'Web Hosting' or 'Hosting', the first couple of results that come up are surprisingly enough, not those of actual web hosting companies, but rather web hosting review sites.

These sites are an excellent resource to assist you with making a decision regarding which web host to choose for your foray into the world of the Internet.

A web hosting guide can help you compare the services being offered by different hosting companies. This is a big advantage because you don't have to visit different sites to obtain details. You can log on to a single site and compare services by bandwidth, by price or by disk space.

The other important advantage that these sites offer is that most of them offer a rating service and the opportunity for clients to post comments or reviews. These comments reveal a lot about a hosting company!

Do not be too alarmed though if you find some reviews that are very negative - it is just not possible for a hosting company to be perfect. They WILL make mistakes. The important thing is to try and ascertain how well they recovered or how well they handled their customer service when the problem occurred.

To get the most out of these sites, you need to know what to search for. Some of the newer sites have more refined ways of offering search criteria - you should be able to search on operating system (e.g. Linux or Windows), disk space, bandwidth, price, control panel, features etc.

You therefore need to know how much bandwidth you require, how much hard disk space you require and maybe even have made a decision up front whether you are looking for Linux or Windows hosting.

Once you have decided about what you need, you can start searching for a hosting service. You can use one of the popular search engines, like Google or Yahoo to find a suitable web hosting review site.

Log on to the site and compare the different packages. See which packages or bundled services meet your needs best. Check and compare the specifications of the hardware being offered by the hosting services. Eliminate the hosting services that don't meet your requirements and send the remaining hosts a list of questions. The questions you ask are not so important, but you will get an idea about how prompt the hosts are in responding to your queries. This can then become a useful benchmark. You can reject those who take too long to answer.

Finally you need to test connectivity. Visit a few sites hosted on the servers of companies that you have short listed. Check the download speeds. Eliminate ones that take too long to open. You should also check on the web hosting review site whether they have any uptime statistics. This will also give you a good idea what type of downtime your website might experience.

Be careful not to select on price only - cheapest is not always the best! Rather look at the average prices and go for a hosting provider that rather offers a middle of the road type of price rather than the absolute cheapest. Another important point to look out for is to see how long the company has been in business!

Christine Anderssen is the owner of Tailormade4You Web Design and Web Development Services and Internet Web Hosting for South Africa. Read the original article on http://www.internet-web-hosting.co.za/webhosting-info/web-server-and-web-hosting-services.html