How to choose the best web hosting company

There is more to web hosting than just finding the best hosting plan. You also need to evaluate the quality and reliability of the web hosting company itself.

Here are a few things to consider when looking for a dependable web hosting company:

Money back guarantee - Any web hosting company worth doing business with will offer a 30 day, 100% money back guarantee. If they don't, there is a reason why.
Uptime guarantee - An uptime guarantee of less than 99.5% is unacceptable. Once your site grows to the point where it receives 1,000+ unique visitors a day, just 30 minutes of downtime can easily cost you more in lost revenue than your monthly web hosting fee.
Server performance - Some web hosting companies will pack as many websites onto one server as possible, causing all of the sites hosted there to be sluggish and experience frequent server crashes.
Response time for information requests - A web hosting company that takes forever to return your call requesting pre-purchase information will take even longer to handle your tech support issues!

Tips for determining the four factors above:

Contact each prospective web hosting company by telephone and ask them to send you an email with the URLs of ten client websites. The time it takes for them to respond will help you out in regards to factor number 4 (above).
Visit those sites and see how responsive they are. Do they load quickly or are they all sluggish?
Contact the webmasters of as many of the "reference" sites as possible. Ask about the web hosting company's typical downtime to see if they have a problem keeping their servers online. Next, ask the webmasters if they are happy with their sites' performance.

The quality of the service provided by your web hosting company is critical to the success of your website. A busy website must be available all the time, and perform well at all times of the day. And when problems arise (and they eventually will), they must be resolved quickly or your bottom line will take a major hit.