Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

Rather than giving you a list of things to consider when choosing a web hosting service, I’ll keep this very simple: get a recommendation from someone you trust. Sure it’s easy to compare storage space, bandwidth, price, features, etc. among dozens of online hosting providers but you can’t quantify customer service and reliability which are arguably the most important things to consider.

We’ve been using the same hosting service, American Hosting, since 1999 (!) for our sites and we couldn’t be happier. American Hosting doesn’t have a super slick website, they aren’t the cheapest (though prices are reasonable), they don’t offer the most storage (but enough for most folks), and they certainly aren’t a big operation - and that’s why we like them. You can talk to them on the phone when you have an issue and unlike other services they don’t seem to have major turnover in support techs. We’ve recommended American Internet to all our clients and they have been extremely pleased as well.

Many years ago we decided to try out another hosting service (a Yahoo! branded option) and let’s just say it was a little too basic (and expensive) for our needs. If you’ve never built or managed a website you may want to stick with an option like Yahoo! but for most folks I don’t recommend it.

Anyway, this all comes back to my original point: get a recommendation, and not just from someone on a random internet forum. Find someone who knows what you’re capable of doing and what your needs are and let them help you find the right host. Everyone has different hosting needs and it pays to ask around until you find the web host that’s right for you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 7:55 am and is filed under The Internets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.