How does a Top Ten Web Hosting Company Get Its Rating?

If you are new to shared web hosting and want to sign a contract with a hosting company to get your own web site, you have probably read a lot of hosting reviews. At a certain point, you may be wondering, how does a hosting company make it into the list as a top ten web hosting company? You may already have some experience at hosting your own site and see a company in a top ten list that was really terrible. If you are a newbie, you may come across a company that looks great, but you never see rated as a top ten web hosting company. Cheap web hosting companies aren't someplace you can physically visit to check out their services, so at a certain point, you do have to trust your gut feeling, but here are some criteria that the experts use to rate hosting companies to help you understand what makes one budget web hosting company better than the others.

1. How is their customer service? This is the number one complaint of web masters and the number one reason why someone will cancel their cheap web hosting service. Most people are patient when it comes to the occasional down time or unexplainable glitch in the operating system, but if that 99% up time disappears along with the customer service, things can get ugly and a top ten rating can disappear quickly. Most problems occur when a hosting company outsources its customer service or sells the hosting company to a conglomerate without telling anyone.

2. How reliable is the uptime? Again some down time is forgivable, but too much and the ratings start slipping. This usually happens when a company leases a data center or has a datacenter with old equipment. Don't fall for the brand of computers the company has listed that they use as servers; find out where they are, how old they are, and how many accounts they have on each one.

3. Do they update the system? A low cost web hosting company can list all of the software they want in their hosting packages, but is it current? Linux based systems are cheap and easy to update because the software is free, but Windows costs money and so does its software. Especially with a Windows hosting environment, you have to make sure that everything is current. If not, your new FrontPage software might not work. The same goes with FrontPage extensions on a Linux hosting system. Another major complaint against hosting companies is that some people never quite get their FrontPage to work because the extensions aren't configured correctly.

4. How much disk space and bandwidth do they offer? To get listed as a top ten web hosting company, you pretty much have to offer unlimited disk space and unlimited monthly bandwidth. Anything less is getting to be unacceptable. However, don't let the word unlimited fool you. Unlimited only means that the company offers the average amount that most customers don't ever surpass. If you try to load a huge sight onto the server with a shared hosting plan, you may not be too happy when it crashes. Read the contract. You'll see where the unlimited space suddenly gets limited.

5. What kind of free software do they offer? This one can be confusing to the newbie. Free software like Coppermine Galleries, guest books, and Joomla do not count as free software. Freebies that you should look out for are PHP, MySQL databases, Fantastico, Ruby on Rails, Python, ASP, CGI, Perl, cPanel, and other real software that you can use. Free site builders don't count either. You can find those on the Internet for free on your own.

6. Do they offer a free domain name? This one is pretty far down on the list because a domain name only costs about $15 if you buy it yourself anyway, but it is still a nice perk. Remember though, if you cancel your low cost web hosting account, you have to pay extra for the domain name to take it with you.

7. Do they offer free Internet Marketing tools? This isn't really that important, but it is nice to get some free advertising credits to get started with Yahoo or Google and maybe some free advice on how to get rankings.

8. How long have they been around? Web hosting companies appear and disappear overnight and some of them start as a couple of guys in a basement with one server and a dream. Who knows? Even the most successful ones seem to disappear. However, if they haven't been around long enough, they aren't going to get rated as a top ten web hosting company.

That's really about the size of it. You may come across ‘I hate .com' web sites that try to scare you off, or even web site with reviews that sound a little too good to be true for certain low cost web hosting companies. At some point, you are still going to have to take some kind of risk when you sign a contract and money exchanges hands. You just have to do a little investigating, use these criteria, and hope for the best. Remember, you can always join a chat room to vent if your cheap hosting company turns out not to be a top ten web hosting company.

Kevin Williams is a owner of http://www.hostingref.com. He is providing information on secrets of web hostingand top ten web hosting comapanies.