Thankfully all my experiences with web hosting companies were relatively OK. Great support teams, great uptime and zero problems with speed, connectivity or that kind of stuff. Nowadays, it is pretty obvious that blogging has affected a whole bunch of the market’s segments and a different approach is to be seen (or at least is should) when it comes to online advertising and not only.

Of course, web hosting companies noticed this trend and tried to offer something attractive and competitive for this newly emerged community called bloggers. For a start-up blog you don’t actually need a lot of bandwidth, storage space and so on. You need a decent amount of everything. I would say the “smallest” package would suit you best for about 6 months (depending on your blog’s growth). After that you would probably like to switch to the next package or if the hosting company gives you the chance, why not customize your current package in order to fit your needs. For example now you don’t need 250MB of storage space, now you need 1GB but you don’t need 15 databases or so, 3 are enough. So that, in my opinion, would be really great; the opportunity to customize your hosting package.

What I suggest you should do before diving in the hosting “pool” is read a couple of reviews about a decent number of hosting companies. Do that just to see what others think about them. Read, read and read happy customers opinions and listen to what some not so happy customers have to say about a particular company. I for example, would read 70%  negative reviews and 30% positive reviews. Of course, it is crucial that you collect your information from some highly trusted sources. Sources that don’t do positive reviews for money or in exchange of other services. You need to find yourself a highly regarded, honest source of web hosting companies reviews. For example before I want to buy a product on the internet I try to dig out some information about it on different forums, reviews sites, etc. just to make sure and to know what others think about it.

Web hosting geeks is a place where you can find web hosting reviews and a lot of information related to some fairly well known web hosting companies. If you want to find out exactly what a company is about all you need to do is to read a couple of reviews related to it. For example a review page has a couple of sections that should interest you. The first one contains a logo of the reviewed company, a link to their site and some pricing information. The next section would contain the host rating and some information about general and additional features. A particular section of interest would be the third one because it contains the customer reviews. Feel free to read as many as you can and make sure you ignore the ones that are nothing else but spam. You can submit your own review if you like. A very important section is about what the host’s script library includes. If you have some dependencies to consider then you definitely should pay attention to these. A live demo might be available as well. Again, a  relatively important chunk of information is in the 5th section where you can find out what the hosting service includes and/or supports. You should definitely pay attention to this section as you don’t want to end up with a host service that for example doesn’t support PHP 5. The awards section  should be so important but might be interesting. In the end a section that contains an overall wrap up of the  review. However if you are not satisfied with what you find over at Web Hosting Geeks you can use their web hosting articles page and choose to find out more information about web hosting by reading some interesting  and relevant articles. The left sidebar can be of great help when it comes to filtering the site’s content as it provides quick access to what might interest you. Also based on their reviews, on the home page you can view the list of the top 10 web hosting companies.

So, that pretty much covers it all. If you would like to read further helpful advices and tips that could help you make up your mind check out their other site. If you prefer a more friendly approach, a blog would be the answer.

As a conclusion, if I was to start all over again this would be the start point.


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