Web hosting has become a big, competitive business. There are many good companies available, and each offers slightly dfferent features. Make sure your host has the features you need. For example, if you are using FrontPage, make sure the host offers FrontPage support. Some hosts offer shopping cart software as part of their plan; many do not.

The next important thing to check is their customer service. This is hard to gauge, because you may not find out their service is good until you're stuck on something and they don't know any of the answers. See what kind of support they offer. Do they have online chat as well as a support ticket system? Can you call them? Sometimes, a small company like Next Millenium, will give more personalized service from a knowledgeable generalist, and you won't have to go through a telephone thicket to get to a human.

You can check the hosting company's "uptime", meaning the percentage of time their servers have been running properly for the last two or three months. However, all computers are machines, so eventually, they'll have problems. The important thing is to find a competent company who respond quickly in an emergency. Besides learning the hard way, the only way to check out a company beforehand is to ask someone knowledgeable or go to a site such as ISPcheck that lets you search their directory by type of service offered and give stats and reviews of the various companies they list.

Frequently, despite good reviews and glowing sales pitches, you won't know till after you sign up how good the company is. Their servers may be slow, or their support poor. So sign up for the shortest term they offer, just to make sure you like them.

There are actually companies who will host your site for free. this is a REALLY BAD idea. Free can actually be quite costly if your site is slow, or it's frequently unavailable or you can't get the statistics on your visitors. If your business or organization depends on your website. it's worth the $70 or so a year to get a proper host. Also, usually a free host will put their ads on your site, and you don't usually get your own domain name. Here are some more reasons to avoid free hosting.

Having said that, there is a company called Host Ultra that offers free web hosting. You don't get your own domain, but for $25 a year, you can upgrade to an ad-free site. There's another new one on the market called ez-FreeHosting. They claim they don't show any popups, just take up a footer with ads. If you only need a few pages, you can just register your domain name with GoDaddy.com They throw in a free five-page site with registration of domain name and they are large and reliable.

More about free hosting...

Plan and Prepare Your Material

Website related resources

A listing of web developers

Websites for fun

Website related resources

A listing of web developers

Websites for fun

Where to Get It

Yahoo! Web Hosting.
A name brand offering 24 hour phone support, an off line site building tool that's easy to use and free templates. Free domain name and custom email accounts with hosting.

Reliable, easy-to-use and affordable. They emphasize technical capability and 100% "uptime". A variety of tools such as blogs, polls, forums and site building tools are available with hosting.

Netfirms Web Hosting Large company with plans starting at $4.95/mo, 24/7 LIVE customer support. Free domain name.

Professional web hosting from Myriad Network. Not cheap, but big on support.