Web hosting business is growing from last couple of years and now it not harder to be a web hosting company yourself. As almost all web hosting companies provides reseller hosting which enables you to start your own hosting business.
Here is a step by step guide to choose a perfect hosting solution for you:
Collect and write your hosting needs:
Sometimes you don't need a lot of disk space and bandwidth as you are going to start small scale websites. So its not a good idea to go with expensive hosting companies. Simply collect and write down your hosting needs and then compare some shared hosting companies one by one to find a few which can fit on your needs.
But if you are really in need of big space and bandwidth then go for a vps or dedicated server. Such as sometimes if you have a discussion forum and your forum is going very popular and need heavy data transfer then a dedicated solution is must.
But sometimes you only need to host a single or a few multiple static websites. Static websites does not need a lot of disk space and bandwidth. So a shared hosting solution always works best for static web hosting. Even if you are looking to host a blog then shared hosting plans will always work at start.
Browse the hosting features:
Go to some of the top hosting names such as hostgator, bluehost, startlogic etc. And view their hosting features. For a static website you don't really need to view advance features like php/mysql, perl etc. But for a dynamic website or blog hosting, you should always look for dynamic features like php, mysql and cgi, perl.
Most of web hosts provides Fantastico which is a great feature. Fantastico can install wordpress and some other great scripts in seconds. And this is all automatic. So this feature is great if you need for blogging CMS etc.
Calculate your bandwidth and disk space needs and compare different hosting companies to find one best for you.
If you are going for a dynamic website then look for latest version of php5. It have more features than older php4. A lot of programming libraries are built-in in case if you are a php developer.
How to know who is reliable:
You can not know which hosting company is reliable by simply going though their feature list. The best idea is go though some web hosting discussion forum like "webhostingTalk.com" and type the hosting company name in the search box with a word "reviews". Then you'll find threads of all positive and negative reviews of that hosting provider. Now its up to you which hosting company you'll be going for after reading these reviews.
