Well if you are reading this, you probably want to open a website/blog/page on the web. You need 2 things – where to put this page and an address for other users to enter it. The address is your domain name and the space is your hosting. Hosting companies want to sell you more. This is obvious because, well, this is their work and you cant really blame them. So this is up to you to know what you need and search for the best company and package. In this article I will present main characteristics of any hosting plan and it’s up to you to decide.

Hosting space
Obviously you want a lot of space because you don’t want to get to a point where you are not placing something or erasing something because you don’t have enough space. But many companies give you super large space and this looks quit nice but make sure to check if you really need it. A simple blog/ small website without too many photos and videos can use any small plan that’s about 1-2GB. You can always upgrade to a different plan in your hosting company

Monthly Bandwidth Transfer
This is quit important if you have a lot of visitors or your pages are heavy. The idea is that any user who enters your site actually download it (not exactly but for simplicity lets assume this is correct) and the monthly bandwidth transfer is the amount of information your visitors can download in a month. So again, for simple text web pages with small pictures can use quit small numbers but if you are using videos and a lot of graphics you should think of that.

Language
Well this is obvious – choose a hosting company that uses your language: PHP,ASP.NET, perl, etc.

Email address
The amount of boxes you can open with your domain extension for example: smaple@yourdomain.com

Amount of domain transfers
If you are planing to get a few domains all transferring to one website you should check this number.

Up time
No hosting is perfect. So you should no that there will be times when the website will be down because of technical problems on the server. But some hosting companies are more reliable then others. There are websites that monitor those hosting companies and you can check how much time they were down.

Price of course!
The prices change start at about 4$ for a month. You get discounts for longer commitment and you have a minimum commitment. Some companies charge set up fee and some companies give you a trial free time. Just compare them.

A few last words of wisdom
Make sure you are checking everything before you start. It looks like very small amount of money but in the end you will have a lot of headache if you don’t check things beforehand. Try to use known companies .I am not saying you can’t use someone new on the market but make sure they are reliable because in the end it’s not only 4$ a month, it’s the money you invest into advertisements and customers you are loosing.

Good luck !!! ;-}