Web Hosting Guide
Finding and buying a reliable web hosting solution is a critical choice. Whether you are doing online business, providing important information or sharing views online on a common interest, you need a reliable web hosting service that allows online visitors to navigate through your site effortlessly. It is only powerful web hosting that allows your website to download, view and update at a minimum.

Trying to identify a web host can be a very daunting task, especially when there are so many available nowadays and all of them promise one thing or another. Therefore, it is essential that before jumping in, you do your own homework or research for selecting the most appropriate web hosting company for your website.
Hosting on Linux or Microsoft Servers
All hosting providers offer both Linux and Windows server hosting options. Unless you intend to use a software package or tools that require Windows then you should choose Linux hosting. Linux hosting provides support for PHP scripts and MYSQL databases, which is required if you want to use any of the popular blogging/content management systems like WordPress, Joomla and a host of other excellent open source packages.
Hosting reviews strategies
Finding these gems amongst the rot is the challenge. I know of a number of webmasters who have to change hosting services 3 or 4 times a year! The downtime involved prevents them doing what they do best, to maintain and develop their sites.

Many personal and commercial web site hosting companies offer the world in their solutions, but actually deliver little. Sifting through the fine print of their various "terms and conditions" is a huge task. Many site owners and webmasters, may not have weeks to pore through all the information offered them.

Regardless of how good any domain hosting service may claim to be or how they represent themselves, the only way you'll get to understand what they are offering is to ask questions - and then to file the answers for comparison later on. Look for user forums on their sites to get a vibe of how other clients are finding the service.
General Types of Web Hosting:
While there are many specific types of web hosting, all hosting solutions fit into one of these three technical categories:

Shared Hosting - Shared hosting is when you rent a portion of a server - like renting an office room in an office building. Usually shared hosting packages are sufficient for basic web sites. If requested, your hosting provider will reserve your own domain name (www.yourname.com) and provide you with email at your domain name yourname@yourname.com). Or if you reserved your own domain name in advance, your web host will provide you with the information necessary to "hook it up" to your web server. Pricing in the category of shared web hosting can range from free to over $100/month dependent on the service offerings.

Dedicated Hosting - This is when you rent an entire server - like renting an entire office building. Once you have your server you can put whatever you would like on it, your choice of applications, your choice of data. You can store whatever you need on a dedicated server with fewer restrictions than that of a shared hosting solution. Low end dedicated servers start around $100/month, and go up from there.

Co-located Hosting - This is when you actually buy the server, hardware, and software. Your server is then monitored and connected to the web from a data center. This gives you the most control of your server - not only do you choose what to put on your server, but what technology will be hardwired to the physical machine itself. Frequent clients of co-located services are web hosting providers, because they want 100% control and ownership of their servers. Co-located services are for companies or individuals in need of mission-critical hosting operations. Co-located web hosting prices are not usually based on specific pricing plans as the prices vary greatly on each individual client's needs.