Instead of tiring you with additional introductions, I’ll simply continue what I started in part 1 – telling you about the most important factors to take under consideration when choosing a web host.

Support availability

Why it’s important
Many established hosts offer 24/7 support, which can be an advantage if you aim for a popular website with many visitors.
The reason is that high traffic websites generate server bandwidth picks which may cause problems if your host doesn’t know how to handle them properly.

On the other hand if your host does know how to handle those picks and avoid server down times, you might not need their support to be 24/7 after all… so it’s really a chicken and egg situation.

Either way, your host should be accessible by phone and email (my personal preference is by chat) at most times and not only during business days.

How to check
Support availability is usually published in the host’s website. If not, just ask them.

User reviews and popularity

Why it’s important
Even though they’re hardly reliable, user reviews may add some aspects of personal experiences when researching for the right host.
The problem is that there are so many websites out there claiming to list the top reviewed hosts while many of the companies listed paid for this privilege.

How to check
Don’t look for “best web hosts” or “top 25 hosts”. Read some feedbacks and threads in web hosting forums instead.
Some examples:
hostingdiscussion and webhostingtalk.

Note: even threads in forums can be biased but have more chance to be authentic user experiences then those top 10 lists.

Host Uptime

Why it’s important
A good host should have at least 99% of average uptime over a given time period.
This means that the server (and your hosted site with it) were available for everyone to visit 99% percent of the time.

If the server was caught “down” in more than 1% of the time, then there is a good chance that at least one visitor who attempted to enter your site, saw a “this page cannot be displayed” page instead. This is known as a very efficient way to lose precious visitors and customers.

How to check
Evaluating a web host uptime before purchasing is somewhat complicated. The host website is usually stored in very different conditions than those of the customers sites, so it’s useless to test its uptime.
Many hosts guarantee 99.99% of uptime but you can’t rely on that as a fact (it’s easier to be convinced when they show you a 3rd party monitoring service graph but even then…who knows).

The best way to test uptimes is registering for a free trial with a host and then use one of the popular uptime monitors such as pingdom for the entire trial period.
Another way is to read user reviews (again, read forums and not top 100 lists) to find some information on a certain web host’s uptime.

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