What if you could get free web hosting? Sounds great, right? Some companies offer you this, while stating that all they need in return is for you to post their ad in a small area of your web page. They don’t tell you that unreliability might be one of the other trade-offs. Read on for more insight into what makes a good web hosting service and why you might be better off paying for one.

You want to ensure that you get web hosting that has a good server. You don’t want to have a lot of people coming to your site and start lagging because of all the traffic that you’ve been attracting to your site recently. So be sure to invest in a server that is reliable to avoid clutter problems in the future.

Switch web hosts if an outage lasts for more than a day. Even if the host explains why the server is down, the most likely reason is that the host did not invest enough into back up plans as far as outages are concerned. Any truly professional web hosts will have ensured that outages will be short and infrequent.

When choosing a web hosting service, always check their record for down time. If you are conducting business through your website, you will almost certainly lose customers if they cannot access your website at all times, day or night. Check not only how many times they have outages weekly, but what the duration of these outages are.

You can choose to have multiple web hosting service providers if you would like in order to maintain IP address diversity. This is important to some people’s business to pad security and other reasons. There are several ways to do this, so if it is also your concern, look into using multiple web hosting services.

Before you commit to a web hosting service, you should first create a detailed list of your wants and needs. If you know what your wants are in advance, you can check off whether the prospective host offers what you need. This way, your decision won’t mistakenly be made based only on price; you will know that all your needs are being met.

To prepare yourself for the experience of using a free web host, get used to the idea that you will have a lot of downtime. Staying up all the time takes some specialized equipment that free hosts don’t really have the budget for. As a result, your site may be down more than it is up.

Don’t purchase a web hosting plan just because it offers unlimited disk space or bandwidth. Compare these plans with plans that offer a reasonable amount of space and bandwidth to determine which is the best plan for your needs. Sometimes plans that offer a finite amount of space or bandwidth are better for your particular needs than plans that offer unlimited quantities of space or bandwidth.

There’s no question that free web hosting is useful to some people. It depends on the reason for your website. If you plan on doing business online, use the tips above to help choose a web hosting company that can give you fast, reliable service so that you can build a strong business foundation upon which to grow your sales.