Speed

Your website should serve pages as fast as possible to visitors and never create waiting delays of more than 2 seconds.

Recommandations:

• Make sure your website gets at least 128MB of memory for a basic DNN website, to avoid recycling which cause long delays of usually more than 5 seconds to visitors.
• Make sure your host comes with a free keepalive service, to avoid your website falling asleep and generating long delays on first visit
• Make sure your website is hosted on a fast network, with multiple 10GBs network connectivity
• Stay away from low cost shared hosting providers, such as 4.99$ / month packages, that fit more websites on the same server to reduce the price. They will not provide dedicated application pools (see reliability) or not enough memory to run smoothly.  The small saving per month is not worth the bad impression left on your visitors. 

Reliability

Your website needs to be available to visitors, as much as possible.

Recommandations:

• Look for a host that guarantees 99.9% uptime.
• Make sure to run your website in a dedicated application pool so that no other website hosted on the same server can interfere with your website and stop it from being reached 
• Make sure all your website files and database are backed up every day, so you can restore your website in case of serious problem / security issue

Email

Email is vital to any business and it is one aspect that greatly varies between providers. Most providers focus on hosting websites and consider email as a side service.

Recommandations: 

• choose a host that can provide you with IMAP access to your emails, so you can access your emails from everywhere.
• make sure they provide you with enough storage so that you will not waste time archiving old emails to save space
• verify that they provide a rich webmail interface so that you can access your emails from any computer without configuring software.
• Modern email offerings enables you to have calendars, contacts and notes. This can also be an interesting aspect to consider.

Support

When you have a problem with your website or with your emails, you want to be sure that you will have proper support and assistance. 

Recommandations:

• Prefer a host that can support the website technology you are using. When using DotNetNuke, it is preferable to choose a host that knows DNN and can assist you.
• Stay away from low cost hosting providers that cut down on support to reduce price.

Flexibility

Changing host can be a challenging and time consuming task. As your company or organization grows, your hosting needs will probably grow as well.

Recommandation:

• make sure your host can adapt to fit your future needs, without moving to a new provider
• consider cloud hosting providers which are more able to adapt and scale your hosting service

Easy to use

Make sure your hosting provider is easy to use and configure.

Recommandations:

• Look for a provider with an easy to understand and user friendly control panel so you can easily manage your services. 
• See if you can get a screenshot or information on the control panel that the provider uses. You can usually tell by the first look if the control panel was designed to be easy to use.

Value

What you want is a great price for a great service.

Recommandations:

• Stay away of low-cost hosts. They usually cut down on every aspect to get the price down and the cost saving is never worth loosing customers. 
• Beware of providers trying to offer you a pricey VPS or dedicated setup when you do not need such setup.

Services

There are some hosts that specialize in web site hosting, others in domain registration, others in email hosting, and others that offer all of these services.

Recommandations:

• Prefer a host that can provide you with all or most of your services in one location.

Many times have we seen companies using 3 different providers for domain names, with 3 different providers for each website. This can become a nightmare to manage. Be sure your host offers you domain registration and try to concentrate on one provider.