Having good, capable and reliable web hosting is an extremely important part of running a successful website. When you choose to entrust someone with hosting your website you are depending fully on them to host your website effectively with little or no downtime and fast connectivity so that your visitors can benefit most from what your website has to offer. A bad web host will lead to little up-time so that your website is not always available to see, and slow loading time of your pages, in some cases so much so that your visitor will become so frustrated and bored that he or she will click off your page without looking.

All websites are different and you need to think carefully about what type of website you are trying to run. Is it a website which requires a large amount of web space and monthly data transfer (bandwidth)? Does your website require the use of programming languages such as PHP and CGI/Perl? You need to think carefully about what requirements your website needs, and if you do not know, then find out by doing some research or asking the advice of a professional.

However, there are certain attributes that a web hosting provider should have so that you get the most out of your website and have as little problems as possible. Before considering buying web hosting, make sure the web host has these features.

- A good online support system. Check that the company you are looking to host with will reply to your questions promptly, because particularly if you are new to the internet, you will have many questions to ask and you’ll want answers quickly so that you can progress quickly and efficiently. Additionally, in the event of a problem with your website, you need it to be fixed quickly because 3 days of down-time on your website could lead to missed visitors and sales.

- A 100% money back guarantee. This is important because often a web hosting deal can look great from the outside, but when you actually buy the hosting it disappoints you and does not work efficiently with your website. With a money back guarantee, you can easily reclaim your money and look somewhere else without any financial loss.

- Good server up-time (the percentage of time the server is active and displaying websites onto the internet). This is extremely important. Always look for server uptime of 99.9% and nothing less, because server downtime leads to missing visitors, hassle, and losing profits.

Here are some other things you should be thinking about when choosing your web hosting provider –

- Does that web hosting provider support the necessary internet languages your website’s needs. If your website has any complicated scripts, such as ecommerce systems then make sure that your web hosting provider supports PHP and CGI/Perl.

- If your website requires the use of PHP then you will probably need access to a number of MySQL databases so make sure that your web hosting provider gives you plenty with your package.

- If you are running multiple domain names on the internet at the same time then think about choosing a web hosting provider which will host all your domains in one account. This will make your businesses and websites a lot more efficient and less time consuming.