The first important step for creating a self managed blog or website is choosing a good, reliable Web hosting. For many of you, choosing a Webhost is a tedious and confused process even more than setting up of the blog.

WHAT A WEBHOST IS

As per Wikipedia :

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center.

Choosing a reliable and cheap webhost is a very complicated and important decision to make as this affects your website performance in long term and short term too.

DECIDING FACTORS FOR WEBHOST

1. Customer support.

2. Restrictions on CPU usage

3. Maximum domains and databases that can be hosted.

Apart from these three factors , other factors are almost common with all the webhosts available over the web. Even for these factors you need to do a proper research to see the actual picture and then only you can choose a good host.

The amount of money spent too is one of the factors which needs to be compared before taking the final decisions. Even some of the freebies associated with some webhost lure you for signing up with them but i recommend that this criter on you should not even think of.

HOW TO CHOOSE GOOD WEBHOST

Webhosting comparison sites helps you in selecting a good webhost by providing you comparison of different aspects of webhosting service for number of webhosts all across the web. The comparison between different webhosts will show you the basic features, the cost associated with it, individual webhosts reviews and a ranking of Top ten in each category.

It rates the webhosts based on categories like Green web hosting, VPS  hosting (Virtual Private Server), Dedicated Server hosting, free adwords credits and few more. It also rates different webhost in terms of awards in different category based on the performance in that year. You can find rankings in terms of say best budget hosting, best blog hosting, best forum hosting, best PHP hosting and many more categories.

It also provides some nice articles relating to webhosting , how to choose them along with how to make money with a blog. It also talks about why you need a good webhost and how to decide between a shared hosting, VPS or a dedicated server option for your blog or site.

CONCLUSION

Everyone should do a proper research and time should be spent on selecting the webhost as a bad webhost will make your website down for days & even a slow website will result in your visitors moving away from your site.