How to Find a Good Web Host

Almost every advertisement for web hosts has a few things in common. They all talk about how much disk space they offer, how much bandwidth they offer and how much they cost.

For a vast majority of web sites these 3 things don't actually help in narrowing down the choice. Almost all web sites will use less than 500MB of disk space and less than 5GB of bandwidth per month, most will use even less than this. The average hosting plan by a major host will provide far more resources than is actually needed. Unless you have very high volume site or other specific needs you don't concern yourself with these things. This doesn't actually help you much in your decision.

Price is also a prominent feature of web host advertisements and a very important factor in the users mind. But believe it or not this does not help much in picking a host. There are hosting plans in every price range and there will be many different hosts competing for your patronage no matter what your price range is. This will help narrow down the choices but will still leave you with many options to choose between.

All these things are important. They are also easy to compare. Host 1 offers 50GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth $10/month while Host 2 offers unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth for $5/month. Host 2 might seem to be a much better deal. (We will ignore the fact that unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth cannot actually exist.)

Ultimately making a choice based on just these things could be a mistake because we are leaving something out of the equation. Of vital importance is the question of support, reliability, stability and honesty. A host can have great features at a great price but if you can't get any help if there is a problem, or they are always billing issues, or your questions go unanswered for days then you have a problem. All these things together (plus more) can be classified as reputation.

Reputation, unfortunately, is difficult to measure, but at HostingScorecard.com they have found a way.

By performing hundreds or even thousands of search engine queries for each host, HostingScorecard.com is able to graph the reputation of many web hosts.

Reputation has been turned into a number. This graph is recalculated weekly and presented to you so that you have more than marketing spin to go by.

You can now compare both the easy to measure things and the hard to measure things, so you now have all the info needed to make a good choice.