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The heart and soul of your web site depends on your web host. As such, this should be your primary focus when starting up your new site. Design and content are important, but if your target audience is unable to reach your site, it does not really matter how pretty it looks, or how relevant your content may be. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that you spend an appropriate amount of time researching the right web host for you.

One of the primary pitfalls that I find when dealing with webmasters seeking an appropriate hosting plan is that too much weight is put on the cost. While I can understand that not everyone can afford to pay for dedicated servers with dual Xeon processors and 4 GB of RAM, this does not mean that there are not affordable alternatives out there that can still provide you with the quality uptime you need and deserve.

I know that some will be quick to point out that there are free hosting services out there, but it should be pointed out that nothing is for free, and this holds especially true in the world of hosting.

The typical free host will either have ads to other products on your site, which we call “traffic leaks” or they will skim a percentage of your traffic and direct it to their own site as payment.

They also will use what is called a sub-domain, which is actually giving credit for any incoming links you may get to them. A good example of this would be with Google’s blog program. You get a sub-domain such as gotwebhost.blogspot.com. If you go through the trouble of building links to it, the actual beneficiary of these links in the long run is blogspot. You also face the additional possibility of the free host shutting down, or terminating your account, and all your hard work has gone down the drain.

While this may have been an acceptable practice 10 years ago when domains were expensive to register, and bandwidth was a lot more costly than it is today, there really is no excuse for it if you are serious about running and developing an Internet business.

There are many types of hosting plans available out there, so you need to know what they are, and the differences between them.

At the top of the list would be your dedicated server. A dedicated server is just that, a server that is dedicated to just you. All the disk space, memory and processor power are there for your websites and no one else. This is usually reserved for someone that either has multiple sites, or one very resource intensive web site.

The next on the list would be your Virtual Private Server, or VPS. A common misconception is that a VPS is the same as a virtual server, and nothing could be further from the truth. A good example of a VPS server would be if you partitioned the hard drive on your home PC so that you could run Windows XP and Windows 2000 on the same computer.

You get your own dedicated disk space, and the RAM and processor have portions allocated to just your partition. The advantages of this include cost, which should be approximately the same as a virtual server, and since you have your own resources (RAM and processor), whatever scripts you may be running will not have a negative effect on anyone else, and what others are doing to use up resources will not have a negative effect on you. I usually describe VPS hosting as a method of having the security of a dedicated server at the cost of a virtual hosting package.

This brings us to the most common hosting plan, shared or virtual servers. Shared hosting is the most popular primarily due to the cost factor. Unlike a VPS plan, you are not only sharing disk space, but the memory (RAM) and processor are all being shared by however many people may be on the same server. This means that if Customer A has a script that runs every day at 3 PM, and Customer B has a script that runs every hour, and Customer C has another script that is running every five minutes, there is a good chance that you will experience some loading delays of your website every day at 3 PM. This is especially true when you deal with a company that over sells their hosting.

A pretty easy way to figure out if the host you are considering going to is possibly over selling is if they are giving you a huge amount of disk space, and what seems to be a comparatively inordinate amount of bandwidth for $3.95 a month, when everyone else you looked at is charging $49.95 a month.

These companies are not expecting you to come anywhere close to using as much as they are offering, and you can be sure that should you come close, they will begin throttling your service, and even temporarily suspend your account until the month ends, at which time the stats reset, and your service is restored until the next time you start using more than they bargained on.

As you can see, you will usually get what you pay for, which brings us to another issue:  customer service.

What happens if your website goes down? What do you do then? Who do you speak with to restore your site so that your customers can access it? Is there a live person that speaks English you can talk to, or are you limited to submitting a trouble ticket to a system?

The Internet is a 24/7/365 operation, and the contact to your hosting company should be the same. I recommend looking at their contact page and checking out what options are available. If they have a toll free number, call it and see if they actually answer the phone and can answer your questions. If you cannot contact them now, what is going to happen when you really need them?

In summary, there are a few things that are very important when deciding on the type of server you will need, and in choosing which host to utilize. In my opinion, the most important things to take into consideration when choosing a host are:

# The proper server for the proper job: dedicated, VPS or shared.
# Overselling of servers.
# Ability to contact your host for emergencies.