I just started this website. A couple of days ago, it occurred to me that I wanted to have web presence - the ability to share KITOs (Knowledge, Ideas, Thoughts and Opinions) with the community. With this realization, I started my search for a web hosting and domain registration service provider. I thought this was as easy as 1, 2 and 3.

1. Think about your domain name and look at register.com (or many others) to see whether the domain is available
2. Compare the prices and features of various hosting providers, start with the popular ones such as yahoo, Go Daddy and others
3. Select one of them and register

As it turned out, I was wrong! My wife had done this exercise as part of one of her classes at DePaul University so I got some help from her. The factors I ended up considering were:

1. Windows or linux based hosting: Some hosting services providers such as Go Daddy offer both, some offer both and have different pricing plans depending on which one you choose. This article helped me conclude that I didn't care because I simply wanted to use this website to post articles, presentations, some learning material and blogs.
2. Money: Is money ever not important? Since I didn't plan to make money off of this website, I decided to use a relatively cheaper provider, which would still provide the features I wanted. I did a Google search with the phrase "top 10 hosting services" and got at least 3 websites that listed various services that were reasonably priced (less than $7.95/month). You may also consider googling on "Cheap hosting services." The important point to keep in mind while shopping for web hosting services is to check whether the hosting price includes the cost of domain. For the beginners in this area, it costs money to own the domain (chintanrajyaguru.com in this case) and it also costs money to buy web space to save your files for your website and provide other features (address book, shopping cart etc.). Check whether the provider has any transfer out fees (fee to transfer to another provider using the same domain name). I calculated yearly price of both domain and hosting while comparing different providers.
3. Features: The most important feature for me was the ability to have my own blog on my website. I didn't want to use a free blogging solution such as blogger.com, which would simply offer blogs, not the facility to publish other content I plan to offer through my website. Also, blogging solutions didn’t let me create my independent identity on the web. Another feature I looked at was the JSP support, in case I host a simple application in the future. Feature specifics are also important. For example, some providers offer unlimited email accounts - important if you are going to create a community using your website - some didn't. Some were extremely cheap but gave only a few MB of web space.
4. Customer Service: Some providers offer email only support whereas others offer phone support. Many providers have "Live Chat" link on their websites but those links don't work so don't be impressed by what they say on their home page. Almost all providers offer 99% or 99.9% uptime guarantee. Some even offer 99.99% uptime guarantee but if it matters to you, check what that guarantee means. Do you get your money back if the uptime doesn't hold, what are the restrictions on this guarantee? My wife gave me a good pointer: Always call the customer service with some question BEFORE you buy the services. How quickly they pickup the phone? How do they talk? For how long they are in business? How many customers they have?
5.   Online Help: No matter how great the customer service is, you have to learn some things on your own unless you are a website and open source geek (providers use plenty of open source tools). Does the provider’s website have a demo to show you how things work? Do they have support, FAQ, forum and knowledge base pages to help you find answers to your questions? On one provider’s website, I did find a knowledge base page but no matter what I typed in the search box, I would always get zero results back!

A hosting service website should at least have the following:

• A free tool to build your website in case you don't know html well. These tools ask you some questions, allow you to fill in details, offer you to pick design and create html for you.
• Information on how to use ftp as you will be adding/removing content using ftp
• Information on possible abuses and how to prevent them. Questions such as how to prevent too many automatic comments on your blog entries, how to prevent some one from using your domain to send spam emails (ideally hosting server should prevent this) should be answered
  
• Resources on creating and maintaining blogs
• Configuring email options

Ask yourself the following questions in evaluating the factors above:

• Am I going to use this website for business?
  
• Do I need to have my questions answered right away?
• Could I afford little downtime?
• Do I need my hosting company to be reputed and stable so that it is around when my site is mature and couldn't be taken down or transferred to another provider?
• Do I need fancy features such as ASP.Net support?

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