This is the third in a series entitled Internet Marketing 101. This series focuses on the basics of Internet Marketing; it will cover the basic pre-requisites to creating an income online and will outline all of the basics steps required to get started. This is a 5 part series and the five parts are: finding your interests, selecting and buying a domain name, selecting and finding a web host, joining affiliate programs, and building your website.

Part 3: Selecting a Web Host

Up to this point in the series, I have talked to you about the importance of working with something about which you are passionate and also how to select a good domain name for your new idea. This post is dedicated to a very subjective and somewhat expensive topic of website building, and that is web hosting. Finding a solid, reliable, supportive and feature-rich web host is not an easy task. There are hundreds (or thousands?) of hosting companies available and their features and costs are all over the map.

What are some features that you should look for when shopping for a web host? In my opinion, you need an uptime guarantee. To me, nothing less than 99% is satisfactory. My previous web host went down very often and it was extremely frustrating, especially when writing a post or working on development projects. In addition to uptime, you can use the following criteria to evaluate web hosts:

Storage Space

Traffic Allowance

Number of Add-on Domains

Number of Databases Allowed

Control Panel Functionality

Before we get to my hosting comparison table, I want to stress once again the importance of spending a few extra bucks on a solid web host. Think of it in terms of money in your pocket versus money not in your pocket. If your web host goes down often, you will lose a lot of money. The extra few dollars that you spend on a quality host is worth every penny in the long run. In addition, Google’s crawlers may try to crawl your site at a time when your site is down and the result is negative in your search engine ranking.

Note that this table was compiled over a few days and the prices and features may have changed.

Now go get a web host. If you don’t like any of the options that I’ve provided, go to Google and search for another web host. No matter which one you end up buying, the basics are all the same and we’ll meet again in the next article to start selecting products to sell.