Despite the common misconception, there are huge differences from one web hosting company to another. Don’t just grab the first host you come across. Take your time, do some research, and choose a host that works best for you. These hints should help:

You can almost always save money on your web hosting by paying in advance. Discounts for multi-month and yearly packages are common. However, you don’t want to lock in with an unreliable host. Try out a new host for a month or two before you lock in a long-term commitment, and check out the cancellation and refund policy beforehand.

When choosing a web hosting package, you need to make sure you get the right amount of disk space. When calculating the amount of disk space needed, you need to think of things like HTML files, graphics, scripts, and multi-media content. If you site uses up too much disk space, you will either be charged more money or the host can shut your site down.

Choose a web host that does not have constant outages. Host sites that have a lot of outages and don’t have any type of backup plan or prevention plans to keep this from happening are probably not a reliable company that you want to deal with. Constant outages show that they’re unprofessional, so don’t join one of these.

When you quit smoking, your blood sugar levels are going to drop dramatically because the loss of the nicotine. To minimize the painful affects of this drop, you should try to get plenty of healthy sugars to try to maintain your healthy blood sugar level. This will minimize the side effects of your quitting.

Keep a list of back-ups when you choose the web host you’re going to sign on with. That way, if the problems end up to be deal breakers you can quickly switch to a new web host with less interruption in your plans than there would be if the web host server crashed all together.

Closely comparing the hosting companies on your short list will help you choose the one that is best for your business’s bottom line. Web hosting costs vary from $2 to $50 a month or more, and many times, the cheaper services have better reliability. Even though an expensive host might offer more bandwidth, there are no guarantees you will have less downtime than a less expensive host.

Does the company offer a portion of your money back if you want to end your contract early? If you become dissatisfied with the service within 30 days of signing up, you should have the right to cancel your service and have your money returned to you. Know what the money-back guarantee covers before you sign up so you don’t get stuck with a bad web host.

Now you really understand the difference between your average host and great companies that have racks filled with servers, all running dedicated memory for hosting your files. Review these tips when your contract is up for renewal, or whenever you’re ready to choose a better host.