Evaluating hosting plans takes time and knowledge about the various aspects of hosting you should care about in your business.  Every online business is different.  You have certain needs another company may not have.  It could be related to the products you have to sell or that you’re looking to start a blog.  No matter what type of site you want hosted you have to do a thorough web hosting comparison to find the best company.  There are seven areas in web hosting you should be concerned with when doing a comparison.  Each hosting company should have at least four out of seven of these features.  A great company will provide all of them.

1. Hard Drive or Disk Space can be unlimited or a set number of megabytes or gigabytes.  Do not get trapped in the shiny offer of unlimited disk space.  For one, you will never be able to use all the “unlimited” means and the host companies know this.  The only way to truly get unlimited disk space is to have a dedicated server.  For a small business a dedicated server can be too expensive for your needs, though this is something you will have to determine.  Instead of going for the unlimited package consider how much space you will actually use.  30 pages will fit in 1MB with an image on each page.  If you do not know what you will use go for 1GB or 5GB of space.  You should have plenty and the chance to upgrade.

2. Uptime is related to data transfer and bandwidth.  Like the disk space you need a set amount of bandwidth and data transfer to avoid the oversold servers.

3. During your web hosting comparison check on the number of user accounts you can set up.  You may not want your employees all to have admin access.

4. Statistics are helpful in that you can generate reports regarding page views, the URL’s visitors used, keyword analysis, and others. Some hosts may not offer a full control panel to generate these types of reports.

5. Data transfer and page view reports are also offered with a few of the hosts.  This section will tell you the maximum allowable number of times a visitor can come to the site and access your pages, as well as how many visitors you actually get.  From this you can determine what the most popular pages are.

6. Domain Pointer is not a tool everyone might want to use, but it is helpful.  If you feel your site will lose traffic due to misspellings and you want to capture those visitors the domain pointer is perfect.  It is designed to send visitors from the wrong URL to your main site.

7. The last trait to look for is the operating system.  If you have Windows based programs and are familiar with the Windows operating system it can be easier for you to go with a Windows host.  Yet, you will want to do a web hosting comparison for price relating to the different operating systems to be sure of your choice.