So you’ve decided to go with paid web hosting, and are looking for a great web host.

You find a plan that, for only $3.95 a month, gives you a bajillion MB a month bandwidth, but the special is only good for another three days. Should you jump on it?

Web hosting is one of those services online that can really come back to bite you if you pick wrong. There are few things worse than building up a website or a blog over months, only to have it be unavailable for hours every day, or for the entire site to go up in smoke without a backup.

Here are some of the qualities that you should look for in a web host.

Reliability

Every host promises over 99% uptime. If you do the math, 1% downtime means your site can be down for about 15 minutes each day. Many hosts don’t do that well, with sites being down for hours at a time.

Customer Service

When something goes wrong, how quickly do they respond? Efficient customer service is the backbone of a great web hosting company. Poor customer service can make your every online activity a miserable experience.

Researching Companies

Luckily, it’s usually pretty easy to get a sense for how reliable any particular company is, and how good their customer service is.

Your first step is to go to the company web site and hunt around until you find a link to their support forum. If you can’t find it, Google the company name and “support forum”, and it’ll show up. Look through the support forum and find out what the recent complaints are about. Disgruntled customers will vent on support forums quite frequently.

Another thing to look for is the typical response to customer problems. Do the company reps ever answer complaints made on the forum? Do they tell customers that the problem is on their end? Do they refer them to a trouble ticket system?

I’ve seen web hosting companies that didn’t have a trouble ticket system, instead every support problem had to be posted to the forum. Turnaround time on replying was guaranteed to be 24 hours. I don’t know about you, but if my web site is down, I want a bit quicker response than that!

I’ve also left web hosts that tried to tell me the problem was always on my end. I’m technical enough to know that they weren’t right, but the average person would have come away frustrated and with their problem still not fixed.

Note that support forums will always have more negative posts than positive posts. That’s because the people who aren’t having any problems don’t usually come to the forum to say that. They’re off doing whatever they need to do with their web sites.

But you can still use customer support forums as a rough guide to how reliable a web hosting company is, and how satisfied their current customer base is.

You should also Google the company name and “review”. Take these with a grain of salt, as many people will post reviews that are thinly disguised sales pitches. Web hosting affiliate commissions are big business online, and there are lots of “review” sites that don’t provide any objective information. But you might find someone who blogs about the host they personally use, or a host they used to use and left.

Every little bit of information helps in making your decision. Ultimately, though, you have to make that decision and move forward. You can always switch to a new web host if the one you pick turns out to be a stinker.