Hi,

short question:

Whats the most popular hoster?

Probably one of the biggest is GoDaddy.

Teresa

There are a lot of good and popular webhosts..

Too many of them and I would suggest that you go with a smaller and more dedicated company. Here are some companies that rank highly with me.

SolidInternet.com
BliksemHosting.com

I have researched so many sites and SeekDotNet is one of the most popular one I guess, besides DiscountASP and Lunar Pages. Btw, is popularity important for you?

Regards,

Tobey Anderson

If you want, you can head over to WebHostingTalk forums and take a look at the reviews given by customers as well as complaints on certain web hosts.

Popularity should not be your primary concern!

First things first, learn as much as you can about the provider:
1. are they in a desirable region (no earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, blizzards)?
2. how long have they been in business?
3. how many customers did they have at the end of LAST year?
4. how many customers did they have end-of-year 2 YEARS ago?
5. is their uptime guarantee realistic?
6. do you understand their terms of service (if not ask them to explain it)?

Region will help you determine if you can expect potential down-time caused by natural disasters. The Eastern Seaboard would not be my first choice due to the growing frequency of severe weather systems (trust me, I live in Southwest Florida but keep servers in a "safer" state).

Find out if they are losing more customer than they gain, or if the company has steady growth. NOTE: Too much growth in a short period of time can be a bad thing. The provider may end up being under-staffed or their datacenter back-bone may become unreliable before they can expand to cover demand.

We all know 100% uptime is not likely. So anyone boasting 100% is normally full of it

Calculate their up-time guarantees to get an idea of what the numbers actually mean to you.

Example (1yr):
99% - 3.65 days
99.9% - 8.75 hours
99.99% - 52 minutes
99.999% - 5 minutes
99.9999% - 31 seconds

If you do not understand something in a web hosting provider's terms of service or usage agreements, you should always ask for an explanation. This holds true no matter what the question may be. If they seem reluctant to answer, or act as if explaining it to you is a waste of their time, you can guess what kind of service you can expect from them once you are actually hosted by them.

[STEPPING DOWN FROM SOAP BOX]

I hope this information helps someone using this forum

I think you gave very good
solution for every client who
purshaise webhosting

By the way 100.000% Uptime is not impossible,
but you cannot Guarantee it, You must give big refunds
of Bandwith I think the maximum guarantee can be
99.99% (52 minutes downtime) by every small or big
virtual hosting company. For example if I have
100.000% uptime I will not guarantee it

Whether 100% is guaranteed or not was not the point. It is still impossible. It's a deceptive marketing practice to claim the 100% (guaranteed) UNLESS the refund information is very plainly stated and not difficult to find (not buried in a 14 page TOS)