Basic & Special Features:
Check for network uptime, disk space capacity, amount of data transfer, supported languages/scripts or databases, and security level. These are the basic things you need to consider regardless of what kind of website you are going to setup. They have a big impact on your site. Your website should be up and running 24/7 so that anyone at anytime can visit it.
Features that may also be useful include various email functionalities, domain management, file administration, and other free add-ons and software. They can automate and ease up tasks in maintaining your site.

Customer Service:
There are instances when your Webmaster already checked everything and still it won’t just work. This is best time to test your hosting support and customer service. Customer representatives should be professional at all times. They should be able to address your concern immediately and with utmost consideration. Most web hosting companies nowadays have 24/7 online chat.

Service Level & Warranty:
Like every other service, you should look for one with an agreed service level. This guarantees their commitment in what they offer. Most people bypass this procedure but you must clearly understand their service level agreement. It will give you an idea what kind of service to expect. Also, most hosting companies now offer either a 30 or 60-day money back guarantee.
Charges & Fees.

Before charging your hosting plan to your credit card be sure that you also check other rates. If you are lucky and patient enough you can find great deals and packages. Also, ask about any other fees they might charge you for some services such as installation or configuration setup.

Ask Around:
Surveys and polls are helpful in one way or another. You can check online to have an idea which web hosting companies offer excellent services at good deals. There are also surveys that list down top web hosting services by category – Windows hosting, Dedicated Hosting, etc.

This can save you time and somehow guarantees that you won’t pick the wrong service.
You can also check forums and blogs regarding best hosting deals. Most of these networking sites are hosted by a third party thus they can give recommendations. Some hosting sites also post a list of their major clients to show that they have good reputation.

A dependable web hosting service is one that can satisfy your hosting requirements anytime and at any given circumstance. If it can provide more than what you need and expect to receive then I would say it is more than reliable.

Now, im using a program called WINSCP, to upload files to my VPS account and its similar to total commander. So you won’t have a hard time using it, if you familiar with FTP ”File Transfer Protocol”. Click here to download the program WINSCP.

Anyone who’s managing only a small website knows that renting a dedicated server or purchasing one is a very big expense. Shared web hosting gives you a server that can carry your files for web publishing at a minimal cost. This means you get a space in a server while you share it with other multiple websites all over the world.

Web hosting servers are known to be powerful, large, and have adequate bandwidth capacity and space to effectively host a lot of websites. The process of selection of shared web hosting includes purchasing a package from a web hosting firm, which also states the amount of bandwidth and space you can get from their server.

The downside of shared web hosting is this. If one or several of those multiple websites you share a server with, gets higher traffic or contain larger files, you will be affected as they can eat up your bandwidth.

Your website loads much slower than you can probably expect and this isn’t good. Moreover, there’s not much excellent customer support given to shared web hosting services. You can also be limited of your storage and bandwidth, which may prove to be a disadvantage once your website starts to grow.

When that scenario happens, it is ideal to shift to a managed web hosting. This type of package is also ideal for those who are keeping some vital information in their sites, especially when it comes to product payment. With managed web hosting, you have a dedicated server. Its bandwidth and space is just yours alone.

The actual administration and management of a dedicated web host can be pretty exhausting and time consuming. Thus, several companies who can afford to have a dedicated server will also go for the managed web host solution. Those who settle for shared web hosting understand that maintenance of their websites is basically left to them.

With managed web hosting, however, you can have somebody else work on management and security issues while you move on to more pressing business matters. You can set an agreement with the company to know their conditions in web site maintenance as well as how they do it. This way, you know what to expect from their side.

System Resource Usage
Any web site that uses a high amount of server resources (CPU time, memory usage) will be given the option to reduce the resources used to an acceptable level or upgrade to a more acceptable plan. Webmasters repeatedly using high resources would end up with a suspended/terminated account.

There are many reasons to what would cause your site to use high server resources but the most common one’s are:

High Traffic Websites:
Your website is simply receiving high amount of traffic daily which would cause the server load to slow, so you will need to get a virtual dedicated server or even an entire dedicated server to keep up with your daily traffic.

Spammer Softwares:
Spammer bots are hitting your site 24/7 causing slow server loads time, those spammers might be posting spam comments in your blog or submitting links to your directory….etc

Search Engine Bots:
Search engine bots crawling your site at the same time frame might cause the server load to slow down. Forums are always effected by this due to the high ammount of threads/posts. Therefor search engine bots like google, yahoo and msn, might crawl the forum for hours in order to index all the content and threads.

I recommand you keep checking your daily/monthly traffic and from where your getting that traffic. The use of “Image Verification” will always help against spammers. Also try to find out some of the spammers IP addresses and ban those ip’s.

Always be prepared to upgrade to a VPS account or a dedicated server if needed. Here is a list of the best companies offering Virtual Private Servers. There is nothing wrong if you put some ad’s in your site, and make some cash to at least cover the hosting fee’s. Here is a web hosting directory that will help find a reliable hosting provider.