Deciding where to host your website is not a trivial decision and, as with most things, you do get what you pay for.

There are a number of things to check when deciding on a hosting company:

• Speed and Reliability is probably the most important: Slow sites lose traffic; visitors are less likely to return if it takes a long time to download a page or if the site is down.
• Good Support: When things do go wrong or you simply want some answers to technical questions, you’ll want to be sure that you can rely on a speedy response and resolution.  It also helps if your hosting company is local and you don’t have to contend with time-zone issues or non-native speakers.
• The Services they offer, as standard or optional add-ons: Do these meet your needs?  Knowing which services to look out for may require some technical know-how and you should probably seek some advice when assessing your needs, but some of the more obvious services to look out for are:


• a Control panel allowing you to manage all aspects of your hosting service
• FTP accounts and setup facility
• e-mail accounts setup facility and optionally virus and spam screening
• Scripting support : PHP, Perl, Python or ASP scripting
• Database support : MySQL or MSSQL
• Statistics
• Backup and restore facility

If you want to make the decision on where to host yourself, we advise you to research your shortlist of hosting companies thoroughly.  One can’t always take what a company’s website say at face value, quite often it is an idealised truth and the reality is often far off the mark!

There are however a number of independent and reliable review websites¹, where customers of hosting companies can post their gripes or praise.  We suggest you look at several of these sites in order to distill the truth.  But beware: we’ve seen one such website with glowing reviews for a particular hosting company, only to discover later that the site was in fact sponsored by that hosting company!