One of the most important decisions you take for your website is to choose web hosting package and the company that gave you that web hosting. When your site is not live, customers can not access it, what could be worse than this?
In this article, I want to give some useful tips for choosing a web hosting company. It's good to put a lot of questions before signing a contract, not after you signed.

1. Provide technical support seven days a week, 24 hours a day?
      Clock technical support is essential for any site. Certainly you have questions about hosting, not always of course, butmany times. When you have questions, and especially when there is a problem, I'm sure you would like some specialists to be at your disposal. When your site is in trouble have no time to wait. A good web hosting company will give technical support both via email and telephone.

2. What experience do they have? Who are their clients?
      There are a hosting company or just resellers of hosting services? You probably do not know, but not all hosting companies use their own servers. Some of them are resellers for other companies. If this is the case with the company where you think to call, you need to know how much you can about the real hosting company whose services they sell. Sometimes reseller (which only deals with marketing) is not pre cooked properly to answer technical questions and technical support will therefore take longer. Check who they are and if their customers are loyal. A serious company attract serious clients. If their clients with personal pages are just webmasters, bloggers with small sites, you should be wondering if they are ready to handle your needs. If you have no idea and can not find one, ask to give you the URLs of ecommerce sites that they host them. Inform yourself as looking in the area. There are a lot of hosting review sites on the net.

3. What type of Internet connection you have?
      Your site needs a fast internet connection. Should look for a web host that has connection T1, T3, OC3, DS3, T1 connection is fast enough for most sites.

4. Provides uptime guarantee?
      No web host is perfect, so expect that your site will be unavailable for short periods of time. Check if they offer a money back guarantee if your site is not live 99% of the time. Check what documents you are require to get the warranty. In many cases you will not be able to provide documentation that they require.

5. What payment plans offered?
      You should not let the price to influence you. Do not be fooled because of the price. In web hosting, as everywhere else, the quality is influenced by the quality. Anyway, look for the hidden costs of site hosting because sometimes the  most less expensive plan may prove to be the most expensive in the long term. In most cases, web hosts offer monthly payment plans, quarterly or yearly, the cheapest being the year. Monthly plan allows you to quickly change the host, if you are not satisfied with their services. And I suggest you choose the plan (despite the higher price) for the first month if you have doubts about the web host you choose.

6. Data transfer

     What bandwidth for data transfer (traffic / bandwidth) offered? Data transfer is the total amount of information loaded / unloaded when accessing your web site. It includes anything on your site which can be viewed or downloaded images, video clips, audio files, software. When the number of visitors increases, data transfer increases. Therefore you should know that traffic is allocated to your account. Some free web hosts claim to offer unlimited bandwidth - not true, read the rules / policy of the company because in most cases you will be required to pay if you exceed the bandwidth limit specified.

7. What space offers?

     What space do you need for your web site? If you expect your site to grow and use more space, looking to host websites offering hundreds of MB / month or more. There are plenty of systems that offer GB / month or unlimited space.

8. They have a backup?
      Backup is very important for your computer, but it's more important to your server, which is always in use. Web hosts offer automated backup solutions every week or month, choose accordingly to your needs. If your site has no daily updates, you may not need daily backup. Also as a precaution it is best to keep a backup on your computer.

9. What features they offer?
      For what features you need to develop your site? You may also need access CGI, PHP, POP3 email accounts or aliases, to check multiple mailboxes in only one. If you intend to use a special application that requires an installation / configuration make sure it's possible to do it with your web host. It offers FTP, Telnet and SSH access? If not, it will be difficult for you to upload and edit files on the server CGI scripts. If you have an ecommerce site you may need SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to transfer the secret information encoded, such as their credit cards and your clients personal data.

10. Provides virtual hosting?
      Virtual hosting allows Web server to host multiple domains on the same computer. If you want to use your own domain name (www.yourdomain.com), then you need virtual hosting. Otherwise, your site URL will be hosted on a folder or a subdomain of the domain host (www.yourhost.com / yoursitename or www.yoursitename.yourhost.com).