Web hosting comes in many different flavors. There are sites that will do it for “free” meaning they want to put advertisements on your site. That may be okay if you are doing a family blog but typically not for business.

Companies that do web hosting provide a number of services. How much they charge on a monthly basis typically relates to their service level. For example, some services, like Hostgator, provide 24 hour online chat for technical questions. If you have an important business, this may be a good option for you. Other web hosting services, like Cheap Web Hosting offer a one year plan at a very low price.

Another factor in your decision can be the size of your site and the bandwith requirements. If you plan to host video you need to factor that in your decision as to which web hosting service you choose. Amazon provides a server service eZs3 to provide hosting for large amounts of video. In a later post I will go into more factors in choosing web hosting.