Finding a fast, reliable webhost can be quite a challenge – especially if you don’t want to spend any money. If you just want to host a blog or a forum, then search google – there’s plenty of free services out there that allow you to do that easily. However, if you want to build your own site or control every aspect you’ll want to find a webhost.
Here’s some basic tips
- Check the age of the supposed “company”. Nowadays, the hosting market has become very saturated and reselling has become popular.
- Don’t fall for “overselling”. This is when a host will offer you absurd amounts of bandwidth and space at no cost. These high numbers are just there to attract you – and it works.
- Check for forums. Many hosts are starting to create forums for their users to chat on. Check the number of users and activity and use it as a potential guide.
- Look for reviews on the internet. This one is very important – other users will post their experiences, good and bad, about the host. A word of warning though: Quite a few hosts have been caught paying people to write good reviews for them. If the host is truly bad, the number of bad reviews will still clearly outshine the good.
- Try to find their uptime stats. You wouldn’t want to find out that your host that claimed 98% uptime has less than 80%.
- Look at their features. For a free host, mysql/sendmail/fsockopen and a few others can easily lead to abuse and are often not available on free hosts. If you absolutely need these, make sure you check if the host offers it before signing up.
- Read their TOS. This can be a very important one – if you want to host a proxy site, that generally won’t happen on free or paid hosting due to the CPU intensity of these sites. Also it is important because some hosts don’t want to host games or photo galleries, which may be what you want to create. Save your time, effort, and possibly money by at least skimming through the TOS. On top of that, remember when I mentioned overselling earlier? Well, this becomes key in their TOS. Often, it will say that the hundreds of GBs of bandwidth they offer you must not exceed ___% bandwidth for files that aren’t text based like html/php. If you want to host some images/software etc, this can be critical.
Good luck in your searches!
