Are you confused about web hosting? This article will walk you through the process of selecting the best web hosting solution available.

Start by assessing your needs and goals. Ask yourself what kind of website you want to create, how much money you expect to earn and how much you want to spend on web hosting. If you have no previous experience with web hosting and do not plan on learning HTML, you need to find a web hosting solution with a quality site-building tool. A user-friendly interface and some tutorials should be very helpful too.

Do not cut down on costs by selecting a free web hosting solution. Free web hosting is an acceptable solution if you want to create a personal website or need to upload some content so you can experiment while learning about web design. If you attempt running an online business with a free web host, your server will not be able to handle the amount of traffic you get and your visitors will not consider you as a professional because of the ads and banners free web hosts usually place on the sites they host.

There are thousands of web hosts to choose from but you should be very selective and take a few weeks to do some research. Start by eliminating any web hosting service with less than three years of experience. Only a small percentage of web hosts survive for more than a year or two, and you cannot take the risk of finding yourself without a host overnight. Read reviews and visit official message boards to see how many people are complaining. You should also call customer services and ask questions about the servers. If you do not get detailed answers, the service you contacted probably rents server space from another company, which means they will not be able to fix your problems.

The ideal web host should be reliable, guarantee an uptime of 99.9% and not put any restriction on your use of bandwidth or the format and languages you can use to build your site. You also need to find a plan with enough storage space for your site and if possible enough room for your site to grow over the next months. If you plan on adding a lot of content to your site, find a web host that offers different plans so you can easily upgrade.

If you keep running into issues with the web host you selected, switch to a different service. Go back to doing some research and think about the red flags you should have noticed when you selected your first web host. Once you find a new host, create an account and upload all your content to the new server. If you do not change the names of your files, all your links will still be valid. You can then associate your domain name with your new server and your new site will be online. This process will be a lot easier if you register your domain name with a different service.

You should do more research about web hosting and talk to other webmasters if you have questions. Give yourself enough time to find a reliable web hosting service before you put your site online.