For those who need a website for personal purposes or their small business, it is strongly recommended to start with choosing an affordable or cheap web hosting company. However, there are lots of low cost web hosting services that makes it difficult to decide the one with excellent and highly reliable services. After all, it can be very difficult and time consuming process to move your website to another web host.

When searching for a cheap web host, you should not just look for the price. There are several other things that also need to be considered before finalizing the decision.

Following are the 4 most important factors that you should consider beyond the price -

• Quality of Customer Service - It can be a frustrating experience to have a web host with poor quality customer service. Good quality business web hosting companies should provide 24x7 support to the customers via live chat, telephone, or email, and the customer care staff should respond to any support case within the time period of one hour. If this is not the case, its time to move on to another quality web host.
• Reliability of Web Host - Most of the web hosting providers have a server uptime guarantee. It is strongly suggested to look for those companies that have uptime guarantee of at least 99% or above. If you cannot find this information on their website, you can email or call them to know about their uptime guarantee. However, if you are not able to find it, you are advised to look for another web host.
• Ease of Use - You should stick with a web host that best suits your technical comfort level. If you are not a technical expert, you will need some software installation scripts and 24x7 technical support to easily manage your website. You should try to find a web host with the above mentioned features so that you can easily manage your website properties.
• Hidden Charges - You need to make sure that everything about the billing cycle and overuse charges is stated clearly by the hosting company. There are some dishonest web hosts that have hidden charges for using some of the extra features and services such as domain name transferring, adding additional FTP account, extra sub-domain etc.
• Backup - Another important factor is to check that whether the web hosting company is offering a backup facility for the website or not. If the company is not offering any kind of backup service, it is wise to review the next web host.

Along with the factors mentioned above, the web hosting contract also needs to be easy and scalable. You should have the facility to upgrade the hosting account according to your requirements. It's a good idea to contact sales department of the web host to know more about the hosting contract of the company.