The first thing that will point you in the right direction is customer reviews. These are past or existing clients of a web hosting company who choose to share with the world their experience with a certain host. Whereas some web hosts may pay their clients or give free hosting for favorable reviews, some of them are very informative and can give you an overview of what your experience with a certain host may turn out to be. Be particular about the negative reviews as they tend out to be more honest.
The other thing you will need to check is web hosting space and bandwidth. You need a web hosting company that can match your needs. How much data do you need to host and how many visitors do you get in a month. Visitor count will help you in estimating your bandwidth usage needs. Avoid over sellers at all cost. If someone tells you that they can give you unlimited storage space and bandwidth, run for the hills.
Scalability is also another option you should take into mind. Will your web host handle your site growth? If your website grew large and was getting many visitors every day, would your web host handle that or you would have to change hosts again?
You need to understand the four types of web hosting and choose the one that suits your needs. First there is shared web hosting. This means that your websites share resources with other users who host their websites on the same server. It is the most affordable web hosting out there and is usually the best choice for beginners. Virtual servers are dedicated servers that are hosted in the same computer but in different partitions. A virtual server will be allocated its own resources thus providing better performance and stability than a shared server. They are ideal for small eCommerce websites or for those whose sites receive a decent amount of web traffic every month. There is also a dedicated server which is an entire physical server dedicated to your web site. Last there is cloud web hosting. This is a type of hosting where many servers (the cloud) are designed to act as one system. It is more secure as performance and uptime is guaranteed by many servers. Adding of extra resources such as RAM and disk space is also made very easy.
Not many web hosts in Kenya will provide all these services. Many of them are usually resellers of big web hosting companies. If your chosen web host can meet your requirements, the thing you will need to be concerned with is customer support. This is where the wheat is separated from the chaff. Web hosting is easy. Great customer support is rare. If your web host can provide excellent client support, you are in good hands. My web host in Kenya is Hostbora because I figured out that for a people who have managed web sites for the last five years, they were better placed to let me know how to solve things when stuff goes wrong. That will happen frequently if you are a webmaster. I therefore encourage you to choose a host that knows what they are doing.
There are many things you should consider but the above are the most important ones. Choose a web host in Kenya because you can call them and talk at very cheap rates. You can even arrange to meet should you need personalized support.
All the best in getting a web host for your business. Take your time to do the research. You will thank me for that.
