Tips to select a Webhost

[Zolin]

These are the following tips you must consider while selecting a webhost :-

1) Check their domain in who-is. If it registered since atleast 2 years or upto upcoming 2 years means either they are in the hosting business since two years or planning to be in for 2 years.

2) Also look at registration name. If domain registered at the name of company means it's company providing hosting. If it's name of person then he/she may get reseller hosting from somewhere and now reselling it. Not much reliable

3) Don't select unlimited offer, such websites most provide to get down

4) Ask for fixed price guarantee for at least a year

[carl]

For any online business, uptime is very critical. You absolutely cannot go with a hosting provider which has an uptime of less than 95%.
Not a single web host can have 100% uptime, and it’s impossible to guarantee.So you must avoid any webhosts promising more than they can deliver. Most claim 99.9% uptime, but due to the nature of computers and communications equipment, outages will and do occur occasionally.

[Christina]

First things you must remember is to calculate how much traffic/bandwidth usage you expect to have to your website. Some hosting provider charge a lot if you exceed your transfer limit. So be sure to read the "fine print" on your hosting plan carefully. Even if you don’t expect a lot of traffic keep in mind that images on a page use more bandwidth than plain XHTML pages.

[James]

If you are planning to sell online,than you will need to check does the web host have shopping carts available? Are they included for free or are they charge extra? Get the names of the ecommerce shopping carts which they provide, and research their capabilities to be able to determine which one is best for you.

[Rodricks]

These are some basic features you should always remember before selecting a web host:

1) 24/7 reliable tech support
2) Your domain name (www.yourname.com)
3) Monthly transfer (traffic)/Bandwidth
4) A minimum of 20MB - 50MB of server space
5) Unlimited true POP email accounts - name@yourdomain.com
6) Unlimited email aliases
7) Email forwarding
8) Unlimited autoresponders
9) Your own unrestricted CGI-Bin
10) Access to SSL Encryption for secure transactions
11) MySQL Database
12) Perl
13) htaccess password protection
14) Server Side Includes (SSI) support
15) Design (and upload to) your site using Netscape or other HTML editing software
16) Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions for those utilizing FrontPage
17) Unlimited free access to your server via FTP/Telnet
18) Easy access to your log files
19) Statistics on visits to your site
20) Referral Program

[bod-jack]

I agree with rodricks,these are some basic points we must keep in mind.