What to Look for When Choosing a Good Web Hosting Company?

There are several aspects you should look at when choosing a good web hosting company. Some of these aspects include: 1. Reliability and speed of access; 2. Data transfer; 3.Disk space; 4. Technical support; 5. FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, MySQL, and crontabs; 6. SSL (secure server) shopping cart; and 7. Email, autoresponders, POP3, mail forwarding.

According to thesitewizard.com, for reliability and speed of access a web hosting company should guarantee its uptime of at least 99.5% and should provide a refund if the uptime falls below that percent.
The Web site also goes on to say not to trust any commerical web host site that advertises unlimited bandwidth because the host has to pay for the bandwidth and if a person consumes a lot then the host will charge the person for the amount consumed. Another good tip the site suggests is to look for details on how much traffice the package allows.
For disk space the Web site syas that most sites need less than 10MB of web space, so don't let more MB space be a big factor when comparing web hosts.
With the aspect of technical support, don't choose a web host that doesn't offer 24/7 support 365 days a year and also be aware that even though it says 24/7 that might not be the case. Instead the Web site suggests that a person test them out by emailing them on a saturday or sunday night and see how long it takes them to respond and make sure that they are technically competent meaning that they know how to fix the problem.
When paying for a site a person wants to make sure they have FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, MySQL, and crontabs. PHP and Perl are necessary because they allow you to implement a feature on your site. .htaccess is necessary if you plan on doing things such as customizing error pages or to protect your site from bandwidth theft or hotlinking. Telnet or SSH is necessary if you plan on testing programs or maintaining databases. If you want to run a blog MySQL is needed. If you plan on running programs at certain times of the day then a cron is necessary to have.
If you're running a business Web site and taking payments via credit card, you will need to check and see if the web host provides SSL. To obtain a Web site that provides SSL normally means a higher priced package for the purchaser, but is essential for business Web sites.
When purchasing a Web host you need to check to see if the host provides and email with the package. Also, you need to look and see if the host provides you with a catch-all email account that allows any email addresses at your domain to be routed to you. You also need to check and see if it allows an autoresponder, which allows you to set an email address that will automatically reply to the person who sent it with a preset message. A couple other questions the Web site says to ask yourself is: "Can you retrieve your mail with your email software?" and "Can it be automatically forwarded to your current email address?"

There are several other aspects a purchaser should look at as well when searhing for a good web host. The above mentioned are just a few of these.