If you are launching a new website, one critical decision is where to have the site hosted. A web host is the location of where your web site actually resides on the internet. It may help to think about this in relationship to a human family. They have many options where they may live, and there is just a single place that is there home at any given time.

Websites reside on web servers, which are computers attached to the internet which keep website pages and serve them up when people want to view them. A computer which stores websites is called a web host.

One choice you will need to make is if you will use a paid web host or a free one.

Using of the free services sounds like a good idea, because not only is the price right, many of them feature easy-to-use web creation tools. Though there are good reasons to use them, you should not do so for your primary sites. Besides showing ads, some of the services are known for deleting your sites for no apparent reason, and there is always the risk of the service shutting down. In either case, you lose the hard work put into building the site.

When you set up your paid web host, you have a few options. You can either purchase it yourself or in the event have engaged the services of a web designer, these professionals will often make web space available to you. Some of the criteria in selecting a web host include:

Cost: what will they charge to host your site? And what addons may cost you more money?

Reliable service: what sort of guarantees are available? You can make an attempt at gauging reliability by asking others who use or have used the web host. Cost is not as relevant if you can’t count on the site being up most of the time.

Cpanel: you should not consider any web host that does not offer cpanel for configuration.