Securing the best web hosting deal for your new site or sites isn’t just a matter of finding the cheapest web host out there. Opt for that and you’ll soon be faced with more headaches than you can imagine. Here are 10 tips to help you find the best web hosting deal for you!

1. Space and Bandwidth – Make sure you have enough space and bandwidth for what you intend to do. If you’re hosting more than one site on the account, you’ll need to do some calculations. Also, remember, there effectively is no such thing as “unlimited bandwidth” despite claims to the contrary.

2. Competitive Pricing – While you don’t necessarily want the cheapest web host on the block, you also don’t want to overpay. Do some comparison shopping and make sure the price you are being quoted is in line with market standards.

3. Pay Month to Month – If in the event you need/want to make a quick exit from your web hosting plan, make sure you can do this without a big cost to you. The best way is to pay month to month.

4. Don’t Tolerate Downtime – In this day and age, with gobs of server redundancy available, there is no excuse for a prolonged downtime. Outages happen, but if you are down for anything approaching 24 hours, seek another web host.

5. Don’t Buy Domains From Your Web Hosting Company – There are many nightmare stories on the Web about customers unable to extricate their domains from the host where they also hosted them. Best answer is to keep the transactions separate, and buy your domains elsewhere.

6. Back Up Your Site – Make sure you back up your site onto your own computer, as web hosts backup can and do fail. Don’t be a victim; make sure you have a copy.

7. Avoid Being Throttled – If you are on a shared server and begin using at or near your allotment, (whether or not you have an “unlimited” plan!) you may find your site being a victim of “domain throttling”, where the host will scale back your resources, effectively forcing you into a bigger hosting plan. Ask about this up front.

8. Control Panel – Sign up with a host that has an easy to use control panel. In most cases this will mean cPanel.

9. Spam Servers? – The last thing you need is for the search engines to think you are a spammer, merely by virtue of being on servers that have been tagged as agents of spam in the past. A good way to check this is to run your host’s IP address on the Spamhaus Blocked IP List at Spamhaus.org

10. Check Out Support – If at all possible check out the support you’ll receive once you’re a client. Phone support is best, live chat next best, and getting back to you in reasonable amount of time is essential.

Do your due diligence with most, if not all, of these and you’ll be on the way to the beginning of a fruitful relationship.