As a freelance web developer, a portion of my business inherently relies on other people doing their jobs for me to be a success. This is never more brutally true then when it comes to dealing with web hosting for a project. The trick is to find affordable web hosting that is at the same time incredibly reliable.

There are lots of companies offering cheap web hosting plans with outrageous guarantees about storage space, bandwidth and uptime. Of those three the most important is clearly uptime. Storage and bandwidth are getting cheaper by the day but a reliable server at a decent rate is becoming more and more of a rare commodity.

This lack of reliable web hosting is why I always stress to other web developers the importance of taking the extra time for research to compare hosting plans. It’s never, ever the wise move to jump for the cheapest web hosting solution. Instead, take your time and conduct due diligence before making a decision. Ask other people what hosts they use but keep in mind that every host is going to have horror stories. Make sure you ask a variety of people for their opinions before making a final decision.

It’s very important that you make the right choice for your web host. If you make a mistake and choose a lousy provider the downtime to switch hosts is going to drive you, and your client, insane and it might result in a lost job.