Top Ranking Web Host Companies - How to Find the Best Web Host

    Selecting a web host is one of the most important decisions you can make as a webmaster, as anyone who has had a bad experience with a web host will testify. This article will help you understand the important things you need to consider, in order to ensure that you end up with one of the top ranking web host companies.

    One of the difficulties in choosing a hosting comapny is that there are such a huge number of them out there now. If you have some experience as a webmaster you will no doubt know that it is much easier to come across a poor host than it is to find a really good one. Fortunately there are a few consistently excellent ones around and this article will help you find them.

    There is no point in just searching the web and looking at the sites you come across for different hosting companies, because their websites are simply marketing tools that will just tell you how marvellous each particular company is. Finding a top ranking web host involves a two pronged approach. You need to understand what you are looking for from a technical and monetary point of view, so that you can see whether a particular host offers what you require, but then you also need to understand whether they actually deliver on what they say they will do.

    I am not going to get into the technical aspects of hosting in this article. Most web host companies can offer broadly similar packages, though prices can vary considerably. It is the point about whether they actually do what they say they will or not that is ultimately going to make the most difference to you, so that is what I am going to concentrate on here.

    This all important aspect of a web host is also the most difficult to assess. Most hosts will promise 99.9% uptime for their servers (and so they should, as even that is less than you ideally want), but whether they actually deliver that uptime is another matter. You need to know what their actual track record is for keeping their servers online, and you need to know how they respond when things go wrong. Make no mistake, things will go wrong at some point, and one of the main ways in which a top ranking web host distinguishes itself from the rest is the way in which they deal with a problem.

    The only way to get the lowdown on the reality of these crucial aspects of the service provided by a hosting company is to see what existing customers have to say about them. Fine boasts about performance and support on a web host's website mean nothing next to dozens of complaints from existing and past customers who say their sites are frequently off line and that the support staff are unhelpful.

    Making an assessment based on customer feedback can be a very time consuming process, which involves trawling through endless review sites and webmaster forums and chat rooms to build up a picture of dozens of hosting companies. An easier option is to look at a site that has already done this and which lists the top ranking web hosts based on customer feedback and overall value.