When setting up a website, whether it is for commercial purposes or just your own blog, to which you want to generate traffic you need to choose your hosting service carefully.  

Having a site that is slow to load and is frequently down is a sure way to frustrate and lose visitors. Google now also looks at this in ranking sites. By using one of the large reputable web hosting services you should avoid such problems.

It is not worth considering free hosting, you have no comeback if the service is poor and you cannot expect anything more than email support. It is not expensive to get a good shared hosting package although there a great many to choose from and some are better than others.

Finding the best hosting package for you can therefore take some work. You might look at review sites but this can confuse matters because they make different recommendations. You might search out user comments but inevitably will find some complaints about every host (to be expected given the number of customers they have). I have looked through a lot of such comments and would say that the majority of negative reviews in one way or another relate to support (or lack of it).

To find the top web hosting service for you, you should to be clear what you need:

• Linux or Microsoft Hosting:- If your site is being built for you then your developers will specify the hosting required. Which you need will depend on the tools you will use to produce and run your site. Most people use Linux hosting in the absence of any specific requirements.
• Type of hosting (shared,VPS,dedicated server):- Whilst it is normal to start with shared hosting, if you expect your site to become busy, it is worth considering what upgrade path a host offers. Shared hosting means that many users’ sites are hosting on a single server and share things like the disk space on that server. It is possible to put too many users on one server but reputable web hosts will not do this.
• Reliability and Speed:- If your site suffers from slow loading and frequent downtime then you will lose visitors. Your host should guarantee uptime in excess of 99.9%. To research this in advance you can look for user comments and try any other sites you know use that host, failing that look at the host’s own site.
• Customer Support:- As mentioned above good support is essential. Quality web hosting services will offer 24/7 support preferably with a toll free phone number in addition to chat and email.
• Resources:- Most shared hosting is sold as “unlimited” with some packages just limiting things like domains and datadases.  Clearly “unlimited” is not possible as a server has finite resources. The host must exercise some control otherwise one user could take all the server resources. Having said that “unlimited” packages do keep it simple and server resources will not be an issue for a new site in the short term and may never be.
• Price:- Once you have found hosts that meet your requirements you should only then consider price. The price difference between the top web hosting providers is not enough to outweigh the other factors above. Most hosts offer incentives to new customers so you can take maximum advantage of these by signing up for as long as possible (provided you can get a refund if you need to cancel).

  If you would like further help in finding web hosting please visit website-hosting-plans.com for more information.