There are literally thousands of web hosting companies to choose from and it's sometimes overwhelming to find the best.  There are even hosts that specialize in specific areas like business web hosting and dedicated web hosting.  Most companies would like you to believe they have the best web hosting support but this is simply smoke and mirrors.

The two top techniques we use to find out which web hosts are really customer focused and which ones are not.  You will want to narrow down your list of web hosting companies to a manageable level.  We recommend somewhere between 6-10 prospective web hosts.  Some of the things we look for when narrowing down the list are:

1) What country are they located in
2) Price
3) Do they offer both phone and email support
4) Are the support hours 24/7

Once you get this list down you will want to do two things:

1) Open a support ticket and ask them a fairly basic question.  You can make up the question it really doesn't matter at this point.  All you are doing is timing their response time.  Does it take them 4 hours to get back to you?  That might be too long.  Most efficient support departments that are staff correctly should be able to get to all support tickets within two hours but often in the first 30 minutes.

2)  Give them a call.  Do they answer the phone right away?  Where you put on hold for a long period of time?  Does the person on the other end of the phone seem professional and can they answer your questions fairly quickly?

Just by taking these simple steps can end up saving you lots of headaches down the road.  Our last final tip is to try and find a web hosting provider that provides at least a 30-day return policy.  There are even a few companies that have 60-day and 90-day money back policies.  These are usually the host with the best support as they cannot afford to lose customers after 90 days.