A personal web site could be very useful asset in promoting your professional image to potential or actual employers and business contacts. Regardless we are considering URL or e-mail address, what would an employer for example think when handed a business card with an e-mail address like yourname@freeserver.com. Would you feel comfortable going to a job interview and leaving your resume referring to your online portfolio available at www.yourname.yetanotherfreehost.com? All your effort and skill displayed by your web content would be almost surely hurt by as little as your URL. Not fair, but likely.

A part of image of successful professionals nowadays is a good personal website. It is well known that success generates success.

The look of a personal URL and e-mail such us www.yourname.biz or contact@yourname.com would definitely benefit to your image as a professional. As you were diligent enough to have a personal website, matter of trusting it to a free web host or investing an additional and usual small amount of money might be difference of being associated with a success story of your career or with cliché of a quite all right fellow that is barely struggling and would make compromises even when it comes to its image.

Any problems with web host, possible downtime, and narrow bandwidth will chase your visitors away and will be associated to your web site.

On other hand, if your are just stating your experience with World Wide Web, or if your are setting up a web site with only close friends and relatives as intended audience, a free web host might just do it for you. These are just a few of examples of having a good reason to publish your web site on a free hosting provider.

Free web hosts helped thousands of people to familiarize themselves with Internet experience, as first cradles for their web presence. This is one of reasons free web hosts have contributed to overall popularity of Internet. As comfortable as cradles are, you can’t spend your whole life in cradle!

So, if you are planning to have a web site to represent you online and you want to be taken seriously, to actually enhance your personal image, make right. Make your web site a living proof of your thoroughness and start with your URL.

Calin Indre is editor at HostPinPin (www.hostpinpin.com), a Cheap Web Hosting Directory Resource.

HostPinPin.com is a resource for webmasters and consumers looking to find a web hosting company. Providing web hosting reviews, articles, tips.

To test quality and responsiveness of support personnel, e-mail them some pre-sales questions. Is response fact enough for you? Imagine that your web site is down and your company is just attending a congress… many clicks are expected, but is your web site online to get them? Is response you are getting from support team thorough or is it merely scratching surface? Is response easy to understand for you?

A provider concerned about quality of his support, would make available as many as possible ways to communicate with its clients. So find out as much as you can about its online support staff, help desk, message boards etc.

Information on reputation of a web-hosting provider is something you might find on forums or discussion boards. Any disgruntled customers there? Would you like to be one?

Reliability is another aspect of problem. Ask for uptime of company’s web servers. Some hosts offer an uptime guarantee, usually 99.9% (100% is not a realistic figure in computer world). The guarantee means that if your web site is not available 99.9% of time, you will be refunded money for that month or you will receive free web hosting for a month as compensation for your web site being unavailable.

Price

Well, true it’s paid web hosting and this means you have to pay for it. My advice would be don’t try too hard to find cheapest possible web host. You will probably end-up wasting an incredible amount of time and is very likely that within two weeks after you have bought it, you will stumble upon a better deal. Apart from irony of it and loss of time, cheaper is not always better.

The other extreme, paying big money to get what you could have gotten for less is equally bad. At $50 for 200 MB of space with 2 GB of bandwidth you are definitely getting robbed, but same service for $5 or $10 is a good deal.

The thin line between a profitable and, why not, enjoyable web presence and a nightmare with slow server response, unreachable support and irritating server downtime is drawn by you. By you choosing web-hosting provider.

Choose carefully: there can be only a few that will live up to their promises and deliver for you good quality web hosting!

Calin Indre is editor at HostPinPin (www.hostpinpin.com), a Cheap Web Hosting Directory Resource.

HostPinPin.com is a resource for webmasters and consumers looking to find a web hosting company. Providing web hosting reviews, articles, tips.