With thousands of website hosting companies on the market it can be very difficult if not impossible to know which web site hosting companies will provide a dependable hosting solution at an affordable price. Having a domain with a good web hosting company, you will be able to get reports on your site visitors and know which of your web pages your customers are visiting most often, as well as being able to check out many other statistics.

Your hosting company will charge you a monthly fee for services that ranges anywhere from $4.99 or $10.99. You will probably pay between $75 and $150 for each year of your hosting. There is always the option of free web hosting services, there could be bouts of server troubles and you’re likely to have substantial limitations in the amount of storage, number of email addresses, FTP upload and so forth. You should just check out a site like HostingTopList.com where there are current web host rankings of the top web hosts.

Be sure the host can accommodate e-commerce, store fronts, blogs, forums, chats and anything else you want to add onto your site. Calculate what your growth needs are and check that this web host can serve you as your site grows. The last thing you want to do is change hosts mid way unless you absolutely have to do so. Make sure that your bandwidth can handle it, if your website hits develop rapidly, your visitors won’t have to wait for your pages to load.

Here are a few things you need to look for in a web hosting company:

1. First-class Customer Support: Your hosting provider should to be at any hour and give you fast access to the technicians you need to help with your problems. Find out how long it takes for them to respond to your problems. An effective test is to call them in the middle of the night to check if you get a real live person.

2. A Sound Infrastructure: Check to be sure they offer a multi-homed network powered by multiple bandwidth suppliers to ensure there is redundancy. Many offer a 100% warranty that covers their network accessibility or network uptime.

3. Financial Stability: If you’re running a critical operation, you can’t afford to be with a host that may have only been in business for a few months.

If you are are confused by the jungle of hosts, check out the current rankings for HostMonster. They are my personal favorite at this time. Good luck in searching for a reliable web host.

Free web hosting is in many cases the most basic web hosting service that you can sign up with, and there are many free hosting providers available on the internet. The companies providing the free hosting accounts usually finance this by ads on the web sites that are hosted.

Another feature about free web hosting services - they are usually extremely limited. If you get a free hosting service, you are forced to have ads on the top and perhaps even on the bottom of your website, and depending on what your website is all about, it may not fit at all. However, if you are amongst those just starting out on the internet, a free hosting account may very well be the best option, since you probably don’t have a lot of traffic, or just a small site.

The type of domain that you receive when you sign up for a free web hosting account is usually a subdomain with the name that you pick (yourname.somefreewebhost.com) or a name in a directory (somefreewebhost.com/yourname). For example, if the name of your free host is the000webhost.com, then your web domain would be yourbusiness.the000webhost.com.

If you are a newbie, this is the type of account that you would probably want to get, but you should be aware of some of the shortcomings this sort of free web hosting account has, especially if you are looking for more advanced options:

Firstly, many free hosting accounts do not support databases. Databases are usually used for online data retrieval routines, or to manage dynamic content on your site, such as a wordpress blog. Many of these free web hosting sites do not even support the most widely used package called mySQL!

Secondly, the free webhosts may not support multiple email accounts; in fact they only give you one email account, which is usually a web based internet account (aka webmail).

However, recently some new companies has emerged, that will in fact give you a free hosting account without the recenly mentioned shortcomings; you get PHP, mySQL, email accounts and lots more! One of them is a free webhosting service found at the000webhost.com. They even allow you to host your own domain (a perfect reason to finally purchase a domain of your own), and you are not forced to display ads or anything like that. How’s that for an improvement!

The downside? - They will disable your account after 15 days without traffic, which could be a problem if you are just starting out. Some would call it a blessing, since it will force you to come up with new and fresh ways to generate web traffic to your site.

By Anders Eriksson, CEO and Owner Datorsam