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Choosing a web hosting service provider for your new website is an important task. When I started my first website I made the mistake of choosing a web host based upon price alone. I didn’t have much money when I started my first website so I chose one of the cheapest web hosts I could find at the time. With a bit of research I learned that the web host was in business over a decade. What I didn’t research was customer satisfaction and server uptime. I thought any business that lasted for more than a decade must know what they are doing. As usual, I was wrong.

The company I chose had horrible servers and database connectivity issues. My website was down more than it was up, customer service was horrible, and their own website was down a lot too. I could not even log into my cPanel to cancel the account. When I was able to login, none of the features I paid for would work. I paid for one-click backups of my database but it never worked. I paid for 99% uptime and one-click install of WordPress. The one-click install of WordPress didn’t work, otherwise there wouldn’t have been database connectivity issues. If automated database creation doesn’t work right, there goes your 99% uptime. Trying to get to my cPanel through the web hosts homepage was useless since their website was often offline as well.

I dealt with them for 3 weeks before I cancelled the account and moved on to my present web host provider, HostGator. HostGator promised one-click WordPress install, 99% uptime and database backup. Everything has worked as promised since day one. I was a little skeptical at first because of my last experience but it has been a pleasure dealing with this new web hosting company. I learned that HostGator is one of the largest web hosts in the world in terms of the number of websites they host, 1.3 million, at the time I signed up. A Google search for “recommended web hosts” returned a lot of recommendations for HostGator, which put my mind at ease. It cost the same as most other web hosting companies and now I see why, the host I first chose was so much cheaper than others but it was terrible.

Choosing a web hosting provider is easy but can easily be a bad choice. I don’t want you to find out that a web host is no good after you already paid for it like I did. Some of the things you should check for in a web host before buying are the number of websites (domains) they currently host, how long they’ve been in business, whether they have a phone based customer service staff, and what their customers say about them in online consumer reviews. Once you have narrowed down a few that you like, you can compare their features and pricing directly and make your decision.

For up-to-date pricing check the official HostGator website.