Good day to you all, I am new on the board.. finally found one about pure web hosting, wooohoooooo

This being my first post, I have a question for all of you.... what is the most important deciding factor for you when looking for web hosting???

I personally think that the most important thing that matters to me from a web host is stability, and speed. I want my pages to load fast and my site to be up at all times...

I want 2 learn what others believe, and see how it compares with what i think here :)

Cheerios

-silicuda

Yup, I agree that stability and speed are important and you could throw in 'Support' in your list of importance.

No matter how good a host is, there would be a possibility of a failure which cause the server to stop functioning fully or partially. A support team would be able to respond to your ticket and do their part in rectifying the problem at hand.

1. Support
At some point - you will need them. Either by phone, in person, email, instant messenger, fax, passenger pigeon...

2. Speed
I do expect a reasonable amount speed when I buy hosting services.

3. Price
To a small degree I care about price. Certainly I don't want to get ripped off, but I do expect Support and Speed above all else.

When I wasn't a host myself, my priorities were in line with savagecat's:

Support
How quickly did they respond to requests? Did they respond with simple "yes" or "no" or "it's fixed", or did they provide a bit of information about what happened or what steps I could take next?

Speed - running a close second
Did my site load quickly? When I made changes to my account through the control panel, how quickly did they take effect? One host I was with made any user-requested account changes (emails, subdomains, what have you) in batch jobs each evening...only mildly annoying; but when I want to change something, I often want to wait the least amount of time for those changes to take place.

Price
Was I paying a fair amount for the services and resources provided? I didn't mind paying towards the higher end of average hosting market prices; but if the disk space or bandwidth turned out to be a candy-coated lie, or some of the features were eternally "in development", I really was irritated.

I started with my first paid web host in 1995. (up until that point I used Geocities, Tripod, even the Armory once - a geekhaus where I lived briefly while in college.) It took me a while until I learned about how much a site would need, what was happy talk and what was real, how much is too much (in terms of resources paid for and prices charged for same), all that stuff.

I always go with the quality of the brand identity of the company. I reckon if they have a well designed brand it says a lot for a company.:D