There are several things you should look up to when you choose your next web hosting provider.

1. Audience

If most of your traffic comes from USA then you should choose USA provider, otherwise you should choose provider in the country that most traffic will come from. This is because the website will load faster if the server is closer to the visitor. If there is reliable provider in the target country then go for USA provider.

2. Hosting provider

Once you determine the location you should choose the hosting provider. Do not go for the cheapest one because you will end up with horrible service. Compile a list of the top 5 hosting companies. Start by investigating how long they have been in business, what types of hosting services they sell, look up datacenter/network information such as connectivity and internet speed, server hardware, how much customers they have and other related information etc.

3. Reviews and Rating

After you narrow the top 3 then you should start by looking for customer reviews. Just do a google search for “companyname review” or “companyname rating” and look for reviews and rating. Large hosting companies with thousands of customers may have bad reviews (because there are many customers) but this should influence on your decision, because people tend to write negative reviews more often than positive (3:1 ratio!).

After you choose the best provider you should look for discounts and coupons.

Online Shopping cart software allows webmaster to build oline stores. Shopping carts software categorize products and/or services offered, allow the customer to collect products virtually in a cart and perform a checkout. Usually the checkout is done via special secure payment gateway (paypal or other), so customer financial data is not stored on shared hosting servers. Mostly because of this many online web stores were created. Other reason would be the free shopping carts. Magento for example is the best shopping cart, with many features including gateway for many credit cart payment processors (on the official site there are more than 300 payment modules available). Other popular shopping carts are Zencart and Oscommerce. All have many features and great community of users and developers. They are all written in PHP and require MySQL or other database system for storing data and customer information. Nowadays almost every hosts have PHP and MySQL support in their big list of features, but a good e-commerce host is one that offers great support, excellent uptime, dedicated IP address and SSL certificate. The best host and the best plans is the business plan from Hostgator. It also comes with cPanel to easily manage your websites. Other good hosts that offer these features are Ixwebhosting, Bluehost, Hostmonster, Dreamhost, Webhostingpad, Justhost and Hostnine.

MySQL Community Edition is free open-source relational database management system. It is the most popular in the hosting industry and it often comes in bundle with PHP, Apache web server in Linux hosting environment (LAMP setup). It is powerful database system, uses Structured Query Language for managing databases, insert data, selecting, updating records. Many popular web applications including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal use it for storing data and settings. Popular websites like Facebook, Wikipedia, Google use it too, so it is pretty much popular. As for mysql hosting I have not met a web hosting company that do not offer MySQL support on their servers. Most of the hosts support remote MySQL so you can access your databases remotely from other server or even from your home PC. Usually mysql management panel is integrated in the control panel (cpanel, hsphere, directadmin or others), with database tool and phpmyadmin. If you are not familiar with creating and seting databases to install some web software, you can use the one-click installers offered. Most top hosting providers have Fantastico or some other one-click installer tool.

Web hosting companies allow reselling of hosting resources (disc space, bandwidth and others) to users and companies. Usually web developers have reseller account so they can easily setup hosting accounts for their clients to easily manage websites. If you are planning to start a web hosting company then reseller account is something you should begin with. You do not need to have any technical knowledge of setting up web servers, configuring software or linux administration whatsoever, but you will need to know how to setup accounts using control panel, manage billing, and provide support to the end users. Most resellers are able to establish branding of the services they resell. Most of the hosts offer integrated billing solutions like WHMCS or WHM.AutoPilot for free for resellers, cPanel control panel and other hosting tools to you to make it easier to sell even more.  HostGator even gives you free ENOM domain reseller account so you can sell domains to your clients. Reseller hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, with prices from $15 and up depending on the host and reseller features. Here are couple of web hosts that offer reseller hosting: HostGator (currently the biggest reseller company), Hostnine, Lunarpages, Justhost and others.

Virtual private servers are between shared hosting and dedicated server hosting. They exists as virtual machines, created by a software, on a dedicated server. These servers are limited by resources (CPU speed, RAM memory and/or disc space), and depending on the type there are VPS that do not interact directly with the hardware (fully virtualized environment), VPS that directly interact with the hardware (where the parent software maintains resource allocation (paravirtualized) – there need to be CPU support for these type of servers, or VPS that can be combination of both. With a VPS you have all the benefits of a dedicated server, for a lot cheaper price. Root access where you can install programs like ffmpeg or special software that you need for your web services or high traffic sites. Some hosts offer managed VPS hosting solutions: they update software for you, configure specific tasks, setup firewall and other, but this is a little more expensive than the standard unmanaged hosting. There are VPS hosting solutions that come with Virtuozzo power panel for simpler administration, and cPanel for web hosting administration. I think that combination of Virtouzzo, cPanel and managed hosting is the best because you get the latest software updates installed, and panels for easy administration of the server and web hosting aspects. The most popular VPS hosting providers are: Inmotion, HostGator, Lunarpages, Ixwebhosting. If you are up to VPS hosting you should check them out.

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor, Personal Home Page tools before) is the most popular web programming language, free and open-source, licensed under the PHP license. It is used for creating dynamic web sites and applications, but can also be used to create desktop applications. Created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, it have become very popular after Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the PHP parser and introduced the new Zend Engine in 1998. It interprates the code in php delimiters <?php ?> and produces output that is sent to browser. The code can be directly placed in HTML files. After the web server receives request, it calls the PHP interpreter (usually Apache module) that executes the code between the configured delimiters. Because it is easier to create web application in PHP, than its rivals perl, python and ruby on rails (and asp.net, though it’s not worth mentioning here), yet powerful language PHP had a fast growth in popularity. The latest version PHP 5 also introduces many object-oriented capabilities that further strengthen the PHP dominance on the internet. Today many of the most popular web scripts use PHP: WordPress (installed on more than 202 millions of websites) – blog software, Joomla – content management script – CMS, Drupal – CMS, Wikimedia (wikipedia), Tikiwiki, PHPBB (forums), Vbulletin, Zencart, Magento (shopping carts) and thousands other scripts that can do almost anything. Together with MySQL and Apache httpd web server (the popular LAMP stack – Linux Apache MySQL PHP) almost any type of website can be created. I have not met a web hosting company that do not offers PHP and MySQL as part of their features, and there are hosts that specialize only in PHP hosting. Good web hosts that are also good PHP hosts are HostGator, Bluehost, Hostmonster, Ixwebhosting, Webhostingpad, Justhost and Dreamhost.

Drupal hands down in my opinion is the best GNU GPL open-source free content management system, better than Joomla, WordPress or other simular CMSs. It have powerful user permission system, api functions for developers, support for modules (extension, code that is separated from the drupal core, adding new functions), theme system (several template systems are supported: phptemplate, smarty and others, phptemplate is default), content management (with ability to create your own content types) and lots of other features. Its large community is helping drupal and the popularity have been increasing in recent years. Many government sites have adopted drupal (whitehouse.gov, data.gov.uk and others) as their backend, but also users for personal sites and corporations use it. The latest version of drupal can be downloaded at the official web site drupal.org, where also can be found the latest news, developments, modules, themes, bugs, issues and other information. In contrast to other content management systems like wordpress, joomla the administration panel is somewhat harder to manage, but there are many tutorials available on the internet so once you get to used to it, it would become simpler. Drupal is written in PHP and uses MySQL database for data storage. I recommend the following php hosting firms: Anhosting, Host Gator, IxWebHosting, BlueHost, Hostmonster, Webhostingpad and Dreamhost) – all hosts support custom php.ini if you need it to turn off register_globals php setting, because it is required for Drupal installation. Or if you do not want to bother with manual installation, you can use the one-click installers offered, though it is not recommended because the latest version is not always available. It is best to install manually by downloading the official package from drupal.org.

Joomla is the most popular free content management system (CMS) licensed under GNU General Public License. With Joomla you can create any type of website whether is personal or community site, forum, blogs, e-commerce site, social network or other. Included features are: content management (text/media), rss feeds, blogs, polls, menu manager, block (widget) support, extensions, template system and many others. With such a large community of Joomla developers and users bugs and security holes are fixed very fast. Although it’s not simple to use as WordPress, Joomla is far more powerful CMS. To have a Joomla powered web site you will need a host that have support of PHP and MySQL database system. I have not found hosting company that do not offer the most popular language and database system as part of its hosting plans (but who knows maybe there is some out there). The usual LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) platform is the best for hosting a Joomla website. I have account with few hosts and have tested Joomla on each one of them (Hostgator, Bluehost, Hostmonster, Ixwebhosting, Webhostingpad, Justhost, Dreamhost, Lunarpages) and on all of them Joomla performed great, so I recommend all of them. Create your Joomla! site now.

Here is a compiled list of top web hosting providers. It is sorted by the popularity of the web hosts at hosting reviews sites:

1. HostGator. At number one spot is Host Gator. Hosting more than 2500000 websites since its creation in 2002. Offers shared, reseller, virtual private servers (vps) and dedicated server hosting.

2. BlueHost. Bluehost is hosting web sites since its establishment in 1996. Currently only one shared hosting plan is available

3. HostMonster. Hostmonster and BlueHost are the same company, except Blue Host is more popular. Only one shared plan is offered.

4. WebHostingPad. Webhostingpad offers affordable hosting with lots of features. Established 2005.

5. IX Web Hosting. IXwebhosting is number 5 on our list. Have been in business since 1999. Shared and VPS plans are available.

6. DreamHost. Dreamhost is the only company that guarantees 100% uptime. On our tests have not failed us yet. Shared and VPS hostinsg is available. Use COUPONMAX coupon to save the most money on hosting plans.

7. JustHost. Justhost is the youngest of all hosting companies here, but it have become popular in the recent two years. One plan only.

8. LunarPages. Lunarpages is established in 1998 and currently have 3 datacenters. Several plans are available and hosting solutions.

We have an account with almost every host here and all are really great hosts. In every hosting plan PHP, MySQL, Control panel (cpanel all, except ix web host offers hsphere), one-click installers, 24/7 support, FTP, phpmyadmin and depending on the plan unlimited disc space, bandwidth, and ability to host unlimited domains. If you have any experience with above host please post your comment below.