How To Select A Reliable Web Hosting Company - Web Hosting Reviews

1. First & foremost do searches in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo & MSN. Simply enter terms like "Complaints about 'Your Potential Host's Name'", "Hosting Reviews ", etc.....You will find a lot of stuff regarding your potential host. Search for web hosting forums; there are numerous such forums on the web that contain all kinds of information. Look for and read articles written about web hosting. If you find too many complaints about your potential web hosting company....beware!
   
   Note: A company that is offering too many features for too little is suspect! If they are offering huge amounts of bandwidth and disk space for a very low price, be careful!. Here is why: The company will most likely be forced to host numerous websites per server, resulting in congestion and server overload. The result: Your site may be too slow and may experience lots of downtime.
   
   
2. A foreign based hosting company may be too far away from your customers. It won't serve you well if your host is based in Australia and your targeted customers are based in The United States. On the contrary, if your are marketing to customers exclusively in Australia, a web hosting company in Australia would be OK. If you are marketing worldwide, your choice becomes a little bit more complicated....unless of course you are Google, Yahoo or MSN, big companies who host their websites almost everywhere worldwide! Generally, we prefer web hosting companies located in The United States. Here is a good list of web hosting companies country-wise.
   
   
3. How fast is your web host? Find a couple of sites that are hosted by your potential web hosting company and test how fast their pages load on your computer. You also may execute the "PING" and "TRACEROUTE" commands on these websites to determine their suitability. Executing the ping command is called "pinging" a website and it determines how quickly a server can receive and send back a piece of data through your connection. When you run ping it sends a small packet of data and calculates the time it takes to get a response from the server. It is executed four times by default and a small report of average, minimum, and maximum response times will be displayed. A ping output typically consists of the packet size used, the host queried, the ICMP sequence number, the time to live, and the latency. All times are given in milliseconds. A ping output indicating large values and/or lost packets consistently over a period of time ....is a red flag!. Please note that if you have a bad or restrictive connection(Your ISP), the results may be skewed. Firewalls and proxy servers installed in your system or network can sometimes interfere with the ping operation. Also, some web hosting companies do not allow "pinging" of their servers, in which case you will get a "Request Timed Out" message.
   
   The Traceroute utility displays the connection [path] through the Internet between your computer and the potential web hosting company's server(s). The path between these two locations has many routers, computers and other devices along it which help move Internet information. Each movement from one device to the other is called a "hop". Too many "hops" is cause for concern ....do several Traceroutes for comparison!.
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SO WHO ARE THE BEST WEB HOSTING COMPANIES OUT THERE?

	One of our websites, The Certification Hub has been hosted by Ipowerweb since 2000. There were problems at first, typical when a web hosting company is experiencing a spurt in growth. In the year 2000, they had a customer base of 15,000. Four years later this number has grown to 300,000+ and their service level has improved tremendously over the last 5+ years. Ipowerweb is one of the best web hosting companies on the Internet. A first class hosting company which we highly recommend. We love them and we have no intention of switching hosts. We moved Club Afrika from Globat to iPowerWeb beginning April 25, 2005. With Ipowerweb we have experienced much less frequent downtimes, fewer email delays and failures. The customer service is superb and well coordinated. The only problem we had at the beginning was their inability to transfer our database from Globat. This site is targeted at users in Africa, most of who are still on dial-up. It therefore makes no sense that these users have to wait for 5 or more minutes for pages to load up. In this respect Ipowerweb has delivered pretty nicely. Our site is no longer slow and we have experienced very few downtimes. Globat may improve in future....we suspect that they are having 'growth problems' just like Ipowerweb had when we first started hosting with them. If they do, then they might be worth considering for they offer the most 'humongous' features in the web-hosting business. Check them out here
	We have been hosting our sister website, Apondo Systems on Lunar Pages since 2000. Lunar Pages - web hosting plans start at 3000MB of storage and 400GB of transfer for only $7.95. It is our opinion that Lunar Pages is a great web hosting company. Great website uptime and customer service!. Very few websites require more than 1000MB of disk space (Apondo Systems has over 300 pages and we haven't even used one half of the allocated space), so if what you are looking for is quality first, Lunar pages is it ...hands down! If you are looking for extra databases, humongous disk space and bandwidth, then take a look at iPowerWeb which is a topnotch company too, or even Globat
	StartLogic is a relatively new web hosting company, a reseller of IPowerweb Web Hosting Services. Naturally, you will expect them to follow in the great footsteps of Ipowerweb. Being the #1 reseller of Ipowerweb, StartLogic's hosting infrastructure is most probably maintained by Ipowerweb, a large and reputable web hosting company. They offer both Windows & Unix Hosting. Due to the 'newness' of the company and the fact that we have not used their services, we cannot judge them authoritatively, but based on the comments we have seen so far all over the Internet, and by virtue of their relationship with Ipowerweb, we think this is a good low cost web hosting company.
	GoDaddy currently offers one of the cheapest prices for Domain Names and Hosting Services. The pricing on packages is very competitive. With Godaddy website templates you can get a nice-looking Web site with ample storage. Reports indicate that their performance is above average. One thing you may not like is that they do not have an 800 number for Technical Support. They prefer local numbers. We think their pricing especially for Domain Names is very reasonable and is worth giving a shot. Also, if you are looking for just a handful of features, Godaddy offers very flexible packages....they even allow you to pay for your hosting services on a monthly basis! The control panel is kind of 'tight', scripting Gurus may not like some of the restrictions but we think Godaddy hosting is worth a try.
	Our website AfroArticles.com is hosted at Hostgator. We were initially attracted by two things: Unlimited Databases and the option of paying monthly and not the usual year long contract. This meant that if we were to disapprove of their services during the self imposed trial period, we would be able to opt out with ease. Well, we haven't because we love the friendly and professional customer service support offered by Hostgator and our website has been running exceptionally well. We have yet to experience any unscheduled downtimes. If you are looking to re-sell hosting, then consider Hostgator; Although the pricing is slightly above the average for other top hosting companies, we feel that the reliability of their services, the bandwidth, storage and unlimited database allocations and numerous other features included with their packages are well with it. Hostgator is a topnotch hosting company, at the same level as iPowerweb and Lunar Pages or better.

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