Before you can start building your website you need to choose a hosting provider. There are a few things that you need to be aware of. First of all if you start doing research you will no doubt find Host provider reviews. You have to be very careful of these so called reviews. Many of these are nothing more than an advertising scheme disguised as a review. You’ll see nice and fancy medals and banners declaring “No.1″“Top Provider”, “Winner of so and so” and many more. The best way is to do side by side comparisons and read everything very carefully.
Some things to look for: Does the provider backup the system for you? Some do most do not, however the better providers that do not, offer you the ability through you control panel to do the backups your self. Does the provider have a redundant array so that if a problem occurs they can go to their backup? What kind of processors are they using? Some of the cheaper providers use slower processors and less memory to keep costs down. A good top of the line server is very expensive, so many of these companies choose a lesser system so that they can keep prices down. Does the provider give you full access to your database and PHP, Apache and MySql configurations? There may come a time when you might have to change the configuration of your server software. If you do not have access then will tech support make these changes for you?
This is a good time to talk about tech support. This is something you have to be very careful with and you should be extremely vigilant in making sure that you get the type of support that you will need. Many providers outsource there support overseas. Believe me when I tell you, you DO NOT want to get involved with a provider like that. There is nothing that is more frustrating than having to have to explain yourself half a dozen or dozen times before they understand exactly what you are talking about. So you definitely want to make sure that the providers help desk is here in the states or at the most Canada. The other thing you want to make sure you have is Live telephone tech support. Some companies will advertise 24/7 tech support, but what they don’t tell you until you find out the hard way, is that the only way that you can get tech support 24/7 is by using a ticketing system. What that means is simply this. You fill out a form online with the problem that you are having and submit it through your cPanel or the customer are of their website. Now imagine that you have to sit there and wait for them to get back to you! Now when they do get back to you, you in turn have to send them a reply clarifying or adding additional information. And you do this back and forth a number of times, all the while your site is down or inaccessible. So make sure that you get live telephone tech support. But you have to also understand that even live tech support will not always help you if you are having a problem with an installation of a particular script (A script is the software that you will be using such as WordPress or Joomla). Tech support will be happy to help you with any server problem but in many cases no more than that. However, the better providers will go out of their way to help when you need help with something other than what their policy states.
One of the things you will see is the long list of “Extras” that a lot of providers advertise. Things like unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, unlimited databases, unlimited websites on one account and so on. Don’t be blinded by the “Unlimited” stuff they give you. There are a couple of these that you do want like unlimited databases, parked or addon domains and websites. As far as disk space goes, the chances that you will use more than 50 GB is very slim, unless you build 50 websites and offer downloads or videos and so on. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not telling you to get a small account, just keep things in perspective that’s all. PHP, MySql amd Apache are indispencable . These 3 things you need to be able to build your site with software like WordPress and Joomla and many many other software scripts.