As many of you know, my company sells e-business applications all over the world. Many times we found customers that, in addition to an e-business application, they need a hosting service. In order to give an end to end service, we offer our customers a hosting service based on resellers plans that we frequently purchase online. Other customers what to purchase their hosting plans themselves separately from our services, and so they asked us how to choose between the different available hosting companies.
Here is my practical guide to choose a reliable hosting company. I’ve to admit that, since using these techniques, we never have a problem with any of the hosting companies that we resell.

1. Select the server operative system you need.
Before you start choosing the best hosting company, you should know if you need a Windows hosting or a Linux one. This depends on the application that you’ll host there. Ask your programmers and designers which server type you need; they’ll probably help you with this subject. Even some Windows servers also support PHP and MySQL, if you really need a Linux plan, it’s better to get a Linux plan and not a Windows one that supports Linux extensions.

2. Determine the amount of space you need.
Nowadays, almost all hosting plan has a huge amount of disk space and data transfer. But still exists some MINI plans that both features are not too high. Perhaps you are planning to host a small application and you only need a great amount of data transfer; maybe you are planning to host lot of media (images, videos, etc) and you require extra space. Before start looking for a hosting company, you should estimate the amount of disk space and data transfer that you business will need, at least, for the next year. You can also get help for your programmers and designers.

3. Search for well known hosting companies.
Once you know the server system you need (Windows, Linux, etc), and the disk pace / data transfer require for your business, you can start searching the web for companies that provides the hosting services. Don’t get into panic. You’ll find thousand companies that can be your potential hosting providers, but be sure that only a few deserve that responsibility. The best way for searching companies, is by recommendation. Ask your colleagues, talk with other companies and let them tell you their experience with their hosting providers. At this point, I recommend you to open a spreadsheet and gather all the information you find for each company in order to help you taking the final decision. It’s very important to pay attention and see if the company offers a plan that fits your need.

4. Find hosting reviews
Once you get a list of potential hosting providers, you can star looking how other people rated that hosting companies. There are many hosting reviews sites: FindmyHost.com, TopHosts.com, WebHostMagazine.com, RateMyHost.com, WHReviews.com, etc. You can find many good and bad comments over there. Some of them could be totally invented in order to position a company on the top; some of them are real costumers’ comments. Just check that reviews and see if how many good/bad comments that those companies have and make your appreciation.

5. Test their service
Finally, here’s the most important task in the process of choosing a reliable hosting company. As you could see, all hosting companies say that they have a 24×7 support. But.., is that really true? Here’s what I used to do:
I tried to contact those companies in some special holidays, for instance, on December the 24th, near midnight, or the day after. I also contact them on December the 31st near midnight, or the day after. I also check where in the world the hosting datacenter is located and figure which holidays that country have. For instance, if the company is located in the US, I contact them on July the 4th. I used to talk to a representative, via chat, or phone and ask them some commercial doubts.
Just figure this: If a hosting company has a commercial people waiting for your call or chat during that special days (and pays for that, of course), probably they also have a support team in the same moment in order to attend any customer call or requirements. So, they seem to be really prepared for any inconvenience, anytime, 24×7. In the other hand, If a company does not pay a commercial representative to be online and ready for your call or chat during that special moments, we can not infer too much about their support area, but clearly they do not have all their critical (sales and support) staff 24×7.
This is the most important part of any decision process for a hosting company. Test their service, especially their commercial one, during those hours and days that you know that almost everyone are celebrating, or sleeping. If they can attend you it’s because there’s somebody that will listen to you anytime.

I did a matrix decision with many hosting companies and I frequently updated it with this information. Many of them fail on the fifth evaluation point.

In order to end this article, if you need my personal recommendation, maybe there are many other really good hosting companies, some of them cheaper, but, up today, we trusted our hosting in the following companies that have really good qualifications: WebHostingbuzz.com, HostGator.com and Rexoy.net and I used to recommend them based on my experience.

If you are looking for a reliable hosting company, just follow this practical guide and do not base your decision only in the hosting price.