Finding a reliable web hosting company is critical to your business, and your life will be simpler if you make a good choice from the beginning. If you are not pleased with your initial web host and need to make a change, that ’ s a hassle. It takes approximately 48 hours to transfer a site from one server to another, and during that time your customers will be unable to access your site. Who knows how much business you may lose during that period?

Here are some of the most important considerations in choosing a web host. First, what is the capacity of their servers? Will their equipment be able to accommodate your business as it grows and needs increased bandwidth? What is their guaranteed percentage of uptime? If their servers are down, your web site is down, and even 1 percent downtime is too much. Do they promise secure routine backups and state-of-the-art virus protection?

Customer service is another high - priority consideration. Choose a company that offers service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Live chat capability is useful, but when we are having a problem, we like to be able to talk to a real person on the telephone, even if it is the middle of the night.

Does the company provide you with an administrative interface that is easy to use? Does the plan accommodate an unlimited number of domains and e - mail accounts? Will your site be able to have a forum for your visitors to communicate with each other? You probably won ’t need that initially, but you may want to include a bulletin board function of some kind down the road. Will you be able to use a WordPress blog? (More about WordPress in Get the Word Out.)

Will you have access to a web site building tool? And, since there is a learning curve for even the simplest system, does the company

Provide easy - to - understand tutorials? Finally, is the price reasonable? There is quite an astounding variation in prices for web hosting.

The company Jillian uses to host her sites meets all the criteria we have mentioned. You can get details about this company and its services, and create your own account, at Www. CashMachineDomains .com . This web host been around since 1996, and is very highly rated. They guarantee 99.9 percent uptime. Their high - performance Xeon servers and secure routine backups ensure total reliability, and they offer round - the - clock customer service by live chat and by telephone. Their hosting package is an excellent value at $ 5.95 a month (at the time of this writing, they are offering a discount of $4.95, but we’re not sure how long that will last). The package includes a huge amount of disk space, a very high monthly transfer allowance, hosting for an unlimited number of domains and e - mail accounts, and the capability of installing forums and databases, as well as WordPress. They offer a web site building tool, an easy to understand administrative control panel, and excellent tutorials. They also offer a free domain name for life to their customers.