Congratulations! You have a great idea for a website. You may even have design planned out in your head or even put down in an off-line structure. However, the distribution of your website is what is most important when it comes to delivering your message to the world at large. Your website hosting company is the distribution company that will help you to create this bond between your website and your viewers.

There is nothing worse than actually obtaining an audience only to have been staring at a 404 screen once your marketing actually begins to work. You also need a website hosting provider that has the ability to scale with you if you are looking to build your website into a commercial platform.

Here are some things that you should understand about choosing a web hosting provider.

Understand the security risks of different kinds of web providers.

Basically, the more you pay for a hosting provider, the more security that you will get. If you go the cheapest route, you may have a shared hosting provider. This means that you are sharing the same physical server with many other websites. In most cases, if a virus hits the server, it will attack all of the websites that are on the server. This means that you may inherit some of the problems of your neighbors without even knowing about it. However, this is a very cheap option that you may be able to use to try a newer website that you are not necessarily looking to invest a great deal of money in from the start.

Most business owners like to go with the option of a virtual private server. Although you will be sharing the same physical server with other websites, there are additional security measures placed in between each datastream so that do not inherit the problems of your neighbors. This is also a method for scaling your website without necessarily having to pay more money for additional resources. The virtual private server will naturally aggregate resources to your website as it grows as long as the total physical resources of the server are not too much to handle.

If you are looking to scale your business online to an enterprise level, you may need a fully dedicated web hosting provider. This is the first kind of hosting solution in which you have access to your own physical private server. There are no other websites or data streams on the server at all there is no way that you will inherit the problems of any other site on the Internet, so the security on a dedicated hosting provider is at a very high point.

You also have access to far more resources on a dedicated private server than you do on any other kind of hosting provider service. This means that you will never have the problem of spikes shutting down your website and causing your customers leave your website disappointed. This is a huge problem for young companies and websites that do not actually expect their marketing efforts to work.

Make sure that you have a hosting provider with a great deal of customer service.

No matter how good of a hosting provider you find, there will always be technical glitches. All of these glitches may not be the fault of the web host; you may try to install some third-party application that interferes with the UI that you currently have. There is no way to avoid this in total. You need to do business with a web hosting company that understands how to take care of problems before they become large problems. You will be able to find these companies through research, reputation and looking up past records online.

The best web hosting providers will also have a phone service and possibly even an online chat service. Some of the most savvy businesses will actually test the services before signing up for a hosting package. You can assume that no company will treat you better during the sales process then they will when you are actually customer, so this is often a great way to see exactly how the customer service will be on a particular platform.

Make sure that your web hosting provider has the ability to expand into new areas.

You should be able to use new applications as they find their way into the business mainstream. There will always be applications that will give you additional features for your customers as well as for your own user interface. Not being able to incorporate these new applications and features may actually put you behind the eight ball when it comes to delivering customer service to your customers. Make sure that any hosting provider that you choose has the ability to expand into new applications.

Although you should not pick your web hosting provider based solely on price, price is definitely a consideration for some companies and smaller websites.

All of the above criteria are actually more important than price when it comes to picking the right web hosting provider. However, this does not mean that good service from the web hosting provider has to cost you an arm and a leg. As a matter of fact, the more aware that you are a price, the better price that you will get.

It is often a good practice to look on website hosting comparison charts before you give any web hosting platform your business. By looking at the chart ahead of time, you will be able to compare apples to apples so that you know exactly what benefits you will receive for a certain price point.

You can also look into the web hosting providers for websites that you attend. This is often one of the best ways to narrow down the list of web hosts that you are considering in the first place. Most likely, if you are visiting a website with no problems, then you will be able to use that same service with the same kind of results.