Ranking Criteria
Price
Price is considered by many to be the most significant difference between web hosting providers. In reality there are many differences that should be taken in to consideration when choosing a web host. Price is important, but it is important to meet all of the needs that the website will require.
Space
Space refers to the physical hard disk space that is provided on the server; this number effectively limits the size and complexity on a website. A GB or gigabyte is equal to 1 billion bytes or 1024 megabytes. There is much variation on how much space hosts offer with their packages.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of information that your web host will allow to be transferred to website visitors. High traffic websites require high bandwidth allotments. An average web page is 50 KB; 1 GB would therefore allow approx. 20,000 page views. A hosting plan with say 50 GB would allow surfers to visit approx. 1 million web pages per month.
Domain Prices
Domain registration prices can range from $3.95 to over $10. Web hosts offering free domain registration save the customer this additional cost. The host will also provide all the configuration necessary to get the domain name operational and linked with the hosting account. This is increasingly becoming a free service for customers as it is popular and not too expensive for the host to absorb.
Setup
Not too long ago web hosts charged a fee for the initial configuration of a web hosting account. Since the setup process is more or less automatic for today's hosts, this charge has been for the most part eliminated across the board. The exceptions to this are custom packages and dedicated hosting packages, which require unique set-ups and configurations.
Money Back
Money back guarantees are more or less an industry standard and will be available virtually across the board, commonly in the 30 day variety.
This is pretty straightforward. POP3 is the email protocol used by Microsoft Outlook and pretty much all external E-Mail software. The number of POP3 E-Mail accounts signifies the number of unique email accounts that can be created under the hosting account. (i.e. user1@mysitename.com, user2@mysitename.com).
# of Domains
This has been an increasingly relative component of the hosting package. It used to be that you had one web hosting account for each domain you owned. Now however, with the huge amounts of server space and bandwidth being provided in hosting accounts, there are enough resources available to host multiple domain names form a single hosting account. Some hosts place limits on the number of domains allowed, and others will allow unlimited domains.
Subdomain
A subdomain is a domain which is part of a larger domain. An example of this would be mydomain.com having a subdomain of sudomain.mydomain.com. This can be valuable for breaking down the different components of a large website.