7. Use steps 1 to 6 to filter out web hosting provider 's you don't want
Having filtered out those sites which don't satisfy the earlier selection criteria, using your web browser, visit those sites that you think look promising.
i) Does the site look professional in its layout and appearance ?ii) Does the website function correctly, click on things, do they have pages that don't work or are missing, or have missing images ?
iii) Does the site look as though it's maintained, is their copyright notice well out of date, does it show when the site was last updated ?
If a page or image appears to be missing, reload the page again, sometimes a page will load on the 2nd attempt.
If pages or images are missing they can't be maintaining their own website, so will they be able to maintain yours ?
8. Check the web hosting provider support page and support ticketing.
i) Do they have a submit ticket page or a demo ?
Click through to make sure it exists.ii) Do they have Live Support, online chat, is it online when you'd expect it to be ?
iii) Do they have a knowledge base, take a look, does it answer typical questions ?
iv) Do they have a FAQ section and does it answer the questions you still have ?
v) Is there a user forum, how many messages are posted, when was it last used ?
Web hosting provider Support Forums are good indicators of user activity and looking at how support issues were dealt with in the past.
Vi) Look at some recent forum posts, what's the date users first registered ?
The date users first registered tells you how long users have been with this host. A long time is a good indicator they're happy with the service.
vii) Do they have online documentation and/or tutorials and are they useful ?
viii) Have they telephone support, for you to contact them and when's it available ?
Because support is so important I give 1 point for every factor here that the web hosting provider has, so that's a 7 point total if they have everything.
9. Check the web hosting provider has a 30 day money back guarantee.
A guarantee with a shorter period ( 14 days ) will not give you enough time to check them out properly.
i) What are the terms of the guarantee, is there a set-up fee ?
If there's a setup fee, you don't normally get this refunded when you cancel within the guarantee period.
Don't choose a web hosting provider with a set up fee.
Ii) Look at the cancellation process, is it specified and can you do easy online ?
If they make cancellation difficult is it because of customer retention problems ?
iii) Be aware that some web hosting provider 's will lure you with low monthly fees, but these often only apply if you take a 12 month contract, so read the small print.
Never sign up to a web hosting provider for a 12 month contract until you've tried and tested their services for 6 - 12 months or longer.
It's easy to impress early on, but you may find they can't keep it up.
10. Review and compare web hosting provider plans being offered.
See if they meet your requirements, do they have a written Service Level Agreement ?
There are plenty of articles on the web that will tell you about disk space, bandwidth, cgi and the like. Go to one of the article directories like Ezine Articles and do a search about choosing web hosting.
What's frequently missed is the importance of a good web stats package.
It might seem trivial at this stage, but choosing a web hosting provider with poor web stats and you'll be completely in the dark when it comes to discovering where your visitors are coming from.
It's also crucial to know if and how often your site is visited by the search engine bots, especially if you are promoting your website to search engines.
The advantage of choosing CPanel web hosts is that they offer a choice of web stats, normally AwStats, Webalizer and Analog. Webalizer is not adequate in one important respect, it will not tell you when search engine bots crawl your website.
AwStats is by far the better of these three stats packages, so make sure your choice of Cpanel web hosting provider 's has AwStats, because not all of them do. If they don't have AwStats it can be because these stats put a higher demand on their web servers.
If they can't handle the demand of the stats, what does that say about their ability to cope with the demands of your web site ?
11. Access the web hosting provider control panel if you can.
Make sure they're using CPanel directly and not one that has their own interface with CPanel in the background. Some web hosts use their own interface which can limit the full features available to direct CPanel users.
Cpanel can have many appearances as it comes equipped with " skins " that web hosts can use to customize its look. The Cpanel version most often used and preferred by many, you can see here is Cpanel X
12. Check the web hosting provider has instant sign-up and activation.
Some web hosting provider 's don't have instant activation and you could wait days before your hosting account is active.
i) Also check to see if they provide you with temporary access to your control panel and ftp to your web space whilst your domain is being updated in the DNS servers.
If they provide temporary access you'll not be able to configure or upload anything to your site for up either a few hours or up to 48 hours, until the DNS servers are updated.
13. Use the web hosting provider support ticketing to ask questions.
Once you have done these checks for all those web hosting provider 's on your short list, visit each one of them again and using their support system, ask them some questions about there service.
You should find there are questions from going through this process for which you don't have the answers.
How long to respond and how well are your questions answered ?
As well as general questions try asking them technical questions like :
i) Do they place limitations on 3rd party scripts you can run, provided they're legitimate commercial scripts that don't involve bulk mailing and Spamming ?
The answer you want is No, but if there are restrictions you have to judge if they are acceptable to you.
Ii) Do they have a cgi script wrapper in operation ?
The answer you want is No. If Yes, it could place limits on running your own scripts, some scripts may not run at all and you'll not find out until you try them.
Iii) Are you able to create and access your own .htaccess files ?
You want the answer to be yes, as this enables you to control redirects and other functions through scripts and not the control panel.
Iv) Do they have wget installed ?
This is required by a number of scripts, particularly those running auto responders and automated tasks.
v) Do they have "Safe Mode" turned on with their servers ?
The answer you want is No.
vi) Is session support enabled or disabled on their servers ?
The answer you want is Enabled.
Technical questions test the knowledge of support people and give you a better view of how they're likely to respond to you as a customer.
14. Still have web hosting provider doubt's, here's a last resort.
Go back to Google and in the search box type the web hosting provider 's domain name in quotes i.e."webhosting.com." Look at the results and see if you can see any forum posts with negative or positive customer comments.
Think about whether comments are genuine, do they sound like real customers ?
Don't be put off by one bad comment, balance any negative comments against the positive ones and remember people tend to write more often about bad service than they do about good service.
15. Registering a domain name, don't use your web hosting provider.
When you cancel your hosting service you could have problems or experience delays in getting them to release your domain name for use with another web hosting provider.
Use independent domain registration like godaddy.com or registerfly.com
This enables you to manage all your domains from one location and to move the domain to what ever web host your want at anytime you want.
16. Sign-up and pay your web hosting provider using PayPal
PayPal offer you the ability to cancel monthly subscriptions through your own PayPal account interface. This means you don't have to wait or trust that the web hosting provider will cancel it.
Whilst there's no absolute guarantee that you'll find the perfect web hosting provider, by using this process you're going to be several steps ahead of the pack in finding a good one.
