1) What Do You Want To Do With Your Website?
Sounds obvious enough, but many people have little or no idea what they are going to do with their new web hosting account once they get one.
Are you in the market for an E-Commerce site, or do you just need web space to host a few of your family photos for friends and family?
The first task should be to identify what you are going to use your website for - this will allow you to rate (in your case) what the most important features are in a web host before making your decision.
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2) How Good Are Your Technical Skills?
If you are not comfortable with basic skills needed in the day to day running of a website; for example: FTP, creating E-Mail accounts, HTML etc, and if you intend to do anything more complex than storing photos, then you may benefit from learning more about the basics before diving in.
If you are technically competent, then the best host for you will be one whose features most closely match your requirements - this will clearly vary depending on what you need your website to do.
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3) Your Budget
Decide on your budget, and stick to it. For example, you may be able to afford $5 a month maximum for your hosting.
Bear in mind that most hosts charge a set-up fee ranging from $5 to $20 or more, unless you can pay for a years (or in some cases, 2 years) worth of hosting in one shot.
While this can save you a bit of money, it is advisable to only do this if you have first hand experience of your host and know exactly what you will be getting. If you do decide to pay in one lump sum, make sure that your host has a "30 day money back guarantee"
Just in case they do not meet your requirements and you need to cancel the plan.
Once you have your budget worked out, the next step is:
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4) Feature Priorities
What are the essential features that your web host must provide, and what can you live without?
You may well only be interested in having static HTML pages hosted for photo albums and simple information pages maybe.
In this case, you will not need dynamic web creation languages like PHP,ASP or MySQL databases.
You should be able to get a plan for $3 or $4 dollars a month to meet your needs in this case.
If you do a lot of database work for example, make a note of how many databases the hosts on your list provide.
Some only provide 1, and extra ones will add more to your monthly fee.
You may need to run subdomains from your main account - again, some hosts allow you to do this, some charge extra.
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5) Beware The "Unlimited" Catch!
We've all seen it - Hosts that scream "unlimited Email accounts", "unlimited FTP accounts", "unlimited subdomains" and the best of all, "unlimited bandwidth"
For a start, "unlimited" is the wrong word to use, since all physical devices have a limit, whether that's a million, a hundred million or whatever.
Additionally, are you really going to need ten million E-mail accounts? Of course not, and you certainly wouldn't want to spend the time entering them all into the system - it'd take years!
What is really mean by "unlimited" is generally "as many as we deem reasonable for your needs"
With bandwidth, it is generally advertised as "unmetered", rather than "unlimited".
Such plans generally cost a little more than standard hosting plans and are best avoided, since the bandwidth you'll be able to get in any month will be capped both by the connection speed at the host and by the number of other users sharing this unmetered connection.
