One of the most important aspects of your website’s development cycle is finding a good home for it. If, at the end of the day, your hosting service provider doesn’t deliver stellar performance, you could be stuck with a lot of source code that no one will ever get to see. That is why it is very critical that you make the search for a reliable hosting service provider an integral part of your web design and launch process.

But that is much easier said than done, because, who is to say which service provider is the best one for you? Just because your competition hosts its site with one provider doesn’t mean that you too should head that way. Even the world’s most renowned hosting service provider might prove to be inefficient when it comes to your particular site.

So, what constitutes a reliable server? Here are a few pointers:

Linux or Windows?: Today, web hosting is mainly divided down these two lines. You can either go for a Linux (or its close relative, the UNIX) server or you can opt for the Windows server. Make no mistake, you can have a website that has been designed using PHP and host it on a Windows server and you can also have a .NET site that you can configure to run on a Linux server – but it wouldn’t be “natural”. You will need to make some major customizations and from time to time you will have headaches as you add patches or pieces of code to make the site run on the “foreign” platform.

The calculation you will need to do would be something like this:

• .NET sites are easier to code and most of the objects (buttons, textboxes etc.) can be created by simply dragging them in. Unless you are creating a site with complex calculations behind the scene, you should be able to have a fully functioning site within a matter of minutes. Updating and publishing the sites is a matter of clicking a few buttons.
• Sites that are created using Linux-oriented languages like PHP need a little more work. There is more coding and configuring to be done and it takes a little extra in-depth knowledge to handle the code behind. But, once completed, you will have a resilient and fast site.
• Windows hosting offers you the simplicity that comes with Microsoft’s GUI. Again, if you have been using a PC, you will find the environment very user-friendly. But, there is a catch: it is more expensive and you are exposed to a larger chance of being hacked or infected with a virus.
• Linux hosting, is fast, efficient and cheap. The only problem is that you will need to know some serious back-end configuration. Otherwise, the text-based code could end up reading like Latin to you.

With these points in mind, you can mix-and-match the code with the server to arrive at an optimal solution. Of course, the processor speed and the amount of disk space you are offered by the host will skew this decision – the more of them they give you, the faster everything will be.

Server Locations: Although it might not be quite apparent to you when you start out, the speed at which each of your site’s page load can be a crucial factor when it comes to keeping your visitors happy. Nobody wants to stay on a page that takes forever to load. As the number of visitors start to increase, you will notice that your pages will start to load a little slower (you can use various free speed testing tools to keep a record of speed performance).

A good hosting solution provider will be able to offer you servers that are located nearer to where your client base or intended audience is. If you are addressing readers in the US and your site is hosted in South Africa, you will see people having to wait longer for their page to load. Moving your site to a server in the US will, in the long run, pay off.

Therefore, choose a hosting service provider that is nearer. Better yet, choose one that has mirror servers and you can have visitors redirected to the server that is nearest to them.

Backup Technology and Strategy: Almost all of the web hosting sites out there offer a “99.9999 percent” guarantee that its servers, and hence your site, will be up and running. In fact, if you find one that offers 100 percent guarantee, tread cautiously – because accidents do happen.

Now, what you should be looking for is not the hosting company that is as close as possible to 100 percent, but the one that tells you that even if your site does come down, they will have it up and running in the least amount of time, and with the least amount of data loss.

How do you know that? First, they will advertise it. Backup is an integral part of hosting and they will let you know that they are on it. But, don’t just take their word for it. A good sign to look for is whether or not they have backup servers in different locations.

Should your site go down on one server, you can, just like in the previous case, direct your visitors to the other backup server (which might be slower) until you have everything working again.

Second, look into how often the servers are backed-up – the more often it is done, the better.

The Price: When it comes to the price, you will need to be careful. There is no average price that you can rely on when choosing your hosting package. Those hosts that offer you their services at just $1 per month might be great when it comes to handling small blog sites – you don’t expect much and you don’t get much.

Others might say that they will give you every conceivable bell and whistle and charge you hundreds of dollars per year.

Therefore, you will need to sit and plan which operating system, how much processor speed, how much disk space and how much bandwidth you will need. Make plans for a little extra (scalability) on all those factors. Once you have that data in hand it is time to go looking for the hosting service provider that will accommodate all of the factors above (or as many of them as possible) while asking you for the lowest price.

One tiny bit of advice: always try to make use of the free or testing offers that hosting service providers give you. Within that limited amount of time, test all possible scenarios and only then sign up for real deal.