3. Truth about forced yearly payments
Another thing you get all over the internet is the host offering you a great deal but only if you pay for the year. A legit hosting company doesnt care if you pay monthly or yearly, because they will always be around and dont care when payment is received. After all if you're happy with them you're going to end up staying much longer than a year. So why? It's because most have horrible support, slow servers, or even tons of downtime. If you were paying month to month you're not going to stick around, but if you paid for a year up front what are you going to do? You won't get your money back so you have no choice but to stay with them. ONLY PAY MONTHLY! We have one plan that requires a year payment up front (hatchling) Why? because most hosts advertise a low monthly fee if paid yearly and a much higher price if monthly. We still need to be competitive so we made one plan showing this option. We would however prefer you sign up for a monthly plan. Remember paying yearly to anyone is always a bad idea, but the choice is yours. We would do everything in our power to honor the year but anything can happen to anyone. If the world got blown up we would most likely be out of business instantly and have no way to honor your payment. All we're saying is no matter how good a company is anything can come up, and you could lose your upfront payment.

4. How much to pay for hosting
Free hosting: There are 3 things to consider when looking at free hosting. The first is can you accept not having your own domain name, i.e. if the website is http://Domain.com/YourName instead of http://YourName.com? Second, can you accept the web host advertising on your web page? Third, there are a lot of free web hosts out there that will promise you your own domain name and no advertising but when you read the fine print what they are offering is a free trial offer. Free really is free but make sure you find out the terms of free hosting service is being offered on. Its very unlikely that you will get reliable hosting that is free, you will be much happier spending a few pounds per month.

Your also most likely to get a horrible service, and be able to do nothing about it, because its free!

Shared/Dedicated hosting: Here are a few important cost factors you should check on before you sign with a host. Find out if your host offers a money back guarantee and what their refund policies are, whether there is a requirement to sign up for a minimum period and if your package is scalable. That is, if your site grows will you be able to expand the amount of bandwidth, disk drive space, and email accounts that you are using at a reasonable price. If you are locked in to a year contract with a host and you start running over your transfer limit you can really get killed on over-run charges. Watch out for unlimited bandwidth or space offers. The bandwidth offers usually come with an escalating price scale and the space offers usually don't include file types like .jpg and .gif files and other large media file types. Sure, it's unlimited, as long as you're only storing text!

Think about it, the cheaper the hosting package is, the more hosting accounts the host has to cram onto the server to make their money back, and you share the resources with all of them leading to a slower and poorer service overall, always be prepared to pay a little extra and get the hosting you deserve.

Never go with a hosting company offering unlimited space and bandwidth, because its just not possible, servers work like any other PC, they have a number of hard drives in them, so server is limited to amount of space on hard drives, hardly unlimited is it?

5. How good is a host.
Do a whois on their domain name. Then look for the creation date of the domain name. If the domain name was created less then a year ago it's more of a risk to join that hosting company. They could be a great host, but considering more then 95% of new hosts go out of business within a year that really isn't something you should be taking a chance on. It's too easy to become a hosting company. All someone has to do is join our reseller plan and they are now a host. Sure the hosting may be good, but that doesn't mean they are going to provide good support nor does it mean they are going to pay their hosting bill. We end up kicking resellers of ours all the time for not paying their bills (after many warnings) and in many cases their unsuspecting customers lose their site.

6. Hosting Directories
Don't believe anything you read on the hosting directories. They don't care who they recommend as they are all paid listings. The highest bidder gets the spot. What you should do to find reviews is search google using the company's name. If they have been around a year you should find many real reviews of people who use their hosting. Another good place to check would be the company's forum, but don't always believe what you see. If someone writes something bad in the forum most hosts will delete their post and ban the user... Our customer testimonial forum is located here we can proudly say we support freedom of speech.

7. Truth to a hosts uptime and guarantees
If a hosting company claims 100% uptime they arent being truthful. All servers need to be rebooted every now and then for security and updates. If they never reboot that means their server is insecure and they will eventually be hacked.

When a company guarantees an uptime, that doesn't make it true. A host has as many uptimes as they have servers. It all depends on what server they put you on, and how well they manage it from the time you're put on it. We guarantee a 99.9% uptime but that does not mean we will hit it every month for eternity. Our guarantee means we give you a 100% refund for the month if we should not hit it. A guarantee is worthless! What is worth something is how they define the guarantee, and if they do in fact honor it.

8. Figure out how much bandwidth you will need
Before you sign on with a new host run some numbers on what bandwidth and other services are going to cost you. The key here is planning ahead and making sure your agreement with your hosting provider is flexible enough to allow you to expand in terms of space, email and especially bandwidth.

As a rough index to figuring out how much bandwidth you'll need use 10 gigs of monthly bandwidth per 500 daily users you expect.

Check out how much bandwidth or speed will cost and think about how much it will cost if your site really takes off. Flat monthly rates are better than usage rates. If you suddenly get an influx of users because of a new product, advertising campaign, or sudden coincidental flood of Google searchers and your usage exceeds your bandwidth usage agreement you may be in for a nasty shock when you get your hosting bill.