With the web hosting industry having over thirty thousand providers all offering different services, it can often feel like picking your way through a minefield to try and decide which one is right for your needs. After all, what may be fine for you as a personal website user is unlikely to be the same for a company looking for a web host, and vice versa. To make sure you have a good web host for you, there are a few important points that you should be looking for:

Quality - one of the main reasons that people choose to leave their existing web hosts and move to another is the quality of service offered (or not, as the case may be). With so many companies striving to get your business, you can afford to look around and compare. Find out what their support infrastructure is like – do they have twenty-four hour customer service seven days a week? This is pretty much standard now and is the least you should expect. Check into the background and reputation of the web host too – this can be easily found in various online forums, and will give you an insight into how legitimate your potential web host is.

Reliability – how reliable the service and back up is should be the next thing you look at. It's all very well paying less for one web host's services than with a competitor, but how reliable is their network? Can it cope with extra pages and content being added? Will it freeze when transactions are being carried out? Will any updates and repairs to the network adversely affect your website while they're being carried out? Unless you can be sure that you're picking a reliable network with support both immediate and on going, the savings made will be useless. Again, check web reviews and forums on a particular web host to see how they compare to others.

Continuity – this can be looked at in two ways, and is extremely important in both. You want to be sure that your web host will still be around in a year, two years, ten years and so on, and again this is tied in with quality. If you've a lot of information that's been built up over the years and you suddenly lose it or have to transfer it because your web host has gone out of business, this can be a major disaster. Similarly, if the web host needs to make changes to its infrastructure and implement new software, will this affect the design and functionality of your website, or will things continue as normal, just in a better manner? Check online again for how your web host is viewed by others.

Although it can be frustrating and take time to find the right web host for you, in the long run it won't only save you money, but possibly something more important – time, investment and peace of mind.