When picking a host for your website, consider these guidelines.1 – "Free Hosts" are never free. There is fine print and you need to find the catch. They may put ads on your site, severely limit your storage or bandwidth so that you'll still end up paying, or end up owning your content or domain name. Cheap hosting is much better.
2 – Make sure you get enough bandwidth for what you're doing. 10-20 gigs a month if you run mostly text with a few, reasonably sized photos. You should be able to get this kind of hosting for much less than $20/month.
3 – If you plan to have more than one site, get a hosting plan that allows for multiple domains on the same, single account. BlueHost.com allows unlimited domains, and does it cheap.
4 – Check out their service reputation. They should offer a member forum and an actual telephone number for times when things go bad.
5 – Look for included ad-ons like PHPNuke, PHPBB2, Joomla and WordPress. If you want a content management system (CMS), it's ideal to have it included with your package.
6 – No package is cheap, especially those offering "unlimited bandwidth", if your site runs so slow that your readers can't see it. Make sure the host doesn't have a thousand sites on a single server, or you'll find your neighbors traffic slowing down your site.
7 – If you're planning on hosting video on your site, look for a much bigger, much more expensive package. You'll still pay less than $50/month, but consider letting YouTube or Revver host your video, which you can imbed right back into your site.
8 – If you're going to have an adult site, find an adult host. Most companies don't permit that sort of content, but you can still find plenty of great hosts just the same.
