Have your website built and tested on your local computer and every thing OK? Congratulations on your great achievement! It time for you to choose your web hosting service now. As it is a new website without many visitors, a shared hosting plan will be enough and save you a lot of money at the beginning. If the traffic increases rapidly later, you can move it to a dedicated server.

The web hosting industry is very competitive because there are so many web hosting providers out there competing with others by providing more disk storage and data transfer at lower prices. So you have the change to purchase a affordable and reliable hosting plan for your website. Here is the important factors you need to consider before you purchase a shared web hosting plan.

Server OS and Scripts Supported

There are both Linux/UNIX platform and Windows platform for the web server. Generally speaking, the Linux server is widely-used and more reliable. Which platform to choose depends on what programming language you are use.

If you use PHP scripts and MySQL database, certainly you need to choose Linux platform, which is well known as the acronym LAMP (Linux OS, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language). This is the standard packages for most of Open Source CMSs. If you use ASP or ASP.net as your web scripts, then you need to choose Windows platform. You have to make sure your website scripts are well supported before you make the decision.

Server Uptime and Reliability

Uptime is a measure of the time a web server has been up and running. It is a very important (maybe the most important)factor for your web hosting. Some of web server especially shared web server have a weak reliability and go down now and then. Therefore your website will not be available now and then. It will cause great loss if the uptime can not be guaranteed.

It is impossible for a server to be 100% uptime, but you do need to choose a hosting company with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. That means the down time should be within 1 minute 26 seconds per day, 43 minutes 49 seconds per month and 8 hours 45 minutes 56 seconds. Read the contract or terms of services carefully and make sure your can ask for the compensation if the uptime is not as the hosting company promises.

Access of Speed

This is another important factor. People will leave your website without hesitation if the web page does not load within 8 seconds. You'd better test the speed of the hosting server before you make a purchase.

Disk Storage, Data Transfer and CPU Usage

Disk Storage is the place you store you web files, while Data Transfer (also known as bandwidth) refers to the amount of bytes that is transferred from the host to visitors. Nowadays, some hosting company offer "unlimited hosting plan" that dose not exist. But they do provide enough disk storage and monthly data transfer, because normally you don't need so much disk space and bandwidth for your website.

But you must be aware of the limit of CPU usage. Because shared web hosting server host many websites sharing the CPU, disk driver and data transfer. CPU is difficult to be upgraded as disk drivers so it becomes the key resource. Excessive CPU resource used by a website can slow down or even crash the website hosting server. Therefore most hosting providers monitor the CPU usage and if your website hit the limit of CPU usage, they will suspend your website for a given time. You may contact the hosting support asking what is their real limitation before you make a decision.

Technical Support

No web server is perfect, even the most powerful dedicated servers have problems. When problem happens, you need the hosting support team to work on it as soon as possible. Most hosting companies state that they offer 24/7 phone, live chat and ticket support. But before you purchase their hosting plans, you'd better test their support at different times and ask some problems. A terrible support can rain your years' effort in a short time.

Hosting Cost

You get what you paid for, so don't turn to a small hosting company for their extremely low price. Price is not the only reason for you to choose any product or service, including hosting package. You always need to consider all the factors stated above and find the most appropriate shared hosting for your web site.