It can be quite tricky to find exactly the right hosting service. It's important to find one that suits you and the requirements of your website. There are plenty of good services out there, but unfortunately, there are even more poor ones. Separating the wheat from the chaff is something everyone has to do on their first time around. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to increase the chances of finding the right hosting service.

Here's a list of things you need in order to run a website:

Let's look at each aspect individually:

Domain name registrar

You've got to be careful here. There are a lot of shady businesses out there. Take for example africaregistry.co.za, which is a subsidiary of the instra corporation. Africa registry offers domain names for predominantly African countries, but charges at least 3 - 4 times the industry standard rates for these domains. For example, their price for a single annual .co.za domain in South Africa is $47 (compare that to around $13 that other registrars charge). To compound the issue it can take weeks for responses to support request - this is a hassle and waste of money that you should strive to avoid.

One way to get around this is to look for hosting services that take care of your domain registration on your behalf at a reasonable price. In this way, you kill two birds with one stone.

Hosted webserver

This is the really hard part - there are so many thousands of hosting services available all around the world that it can be impossible to decide which one is most suitable. Here are a few tips that may help you decide:

Admittedly, matching your website to a package can be difficult. Things are made more complicated by the fact that often hosting services make disingenuous promises. Often you'll see unmetered/unlimited bandwidth and this can be quite attractive. But in order to make this promise profitable, the hosters cram far too many websites onto their servers - so you might have unlimited bandwidth, it's just very slow because too many people are using it.

Go for services that give you what you need at a reasonable price - and value support highly. You never know when you need it, but paying a service $2 a month won't buy you a lot of quality support - how could it?

Website

For me, this is a no-brainer. Go with Drupal or a Drupal based distribution, like Site prebuilder. Drupal is a hugely popular, free open source website platform that can handle anything from basic pages and blogs to eCommerce and social or media driven sites.

By using an open source website package like Drupal, you empower yourself to take charge of your own web presence. This saves you money by avoiding expensive development, and diminishes your reliance on third parties.

Ultimately, if you are using Drupal as your web platform of choice (like the White house, British government, Reuters, Harvard and many, many more) then you want a hosting service that will handle your domain registration, give you a quality hosting platform with all the facilities you need, as well as hosting support and Drupal support.

Remember, you might end up paying $30 a month for a more comprehensive hosting package, but compare this to the days or weeks you may spend on a $10 a month hosting package, trying to fix problems yourself. If your hourly earning rate works out to around $30, for example, then spending more than an hour a month trying to fix problems without support is effectively a waste of money - not to mention frustrating.