1. The reputation of the web hosting company.
Most web hosting companies on the web have been in existence for at least 2 years and they are usually handled by experience and IT savvy network engineers who can provide the necessary support and services to their customers. However, there are also several "mom and pop" set ups out there which are handled by amateurs who are greedy to make plenty of your own money without even knowing how to do something as fundamental as setting up your user account. Be sure to check the credentials of the web hosting firm by either reading their about us or the technology they use for their server farm. Make sure you pick a company that has been around for at the very least 2 years and have a successful track record with 95% up time for all its servers. That's a reasonable expectation as 100% is not a realistic aim in the computing world.
2. How much of storage space are you given?
Most web companies out the offer space that range from as small as 20 MB to as big as 2GB or even more. However, this depends largely upon you the user. Make sure you do not get sold into buying more space then you need. This is a common trend amongst novice web owners who tend to feel that the bigger space the better and the more powerful their website can be. That is the most contorted statement I have ever heard in my 5 years as a IT expert and internet marketing consultant. Personally, I would recommend you to use Host4profit as your hosting company because I find that they provide the most innovative packages that even reward you by paying you to be a member & in many other ways too one of which includes a trip to the Bahamas. Find out more at my website at: http://www.neptune500.com simply click the blue button on your left which is animated when you get there.
3. What is the available bandwidth space for you to transfer data each month?
We all need to transfer data to our website and update its content often in order to stay afresh and also to keep our ratings high up on the search engines right? Well all web hosting companies offer a certain bandwidth or "transfer window" if you will to enable you transport your data from your local computer hard disk drive to your web server. However this transfer window has a limited space. This is set to prevent the servers on their side from having a bandwidth overload from users repeatedly transferring large amounts of data to and fro without any limits being set. A bandwidth space is allocated to enable you to manage the amount data that you want to transfer each month into the storage space allocated. Note that the data you transfer is constantly kept track of until you have reach the transfer limit for that month. Most web hosting companies tend to be stingy on this so as to provide so called "high speed data transfer" to their clients. They usually cap this bandwidth off at 1GB. Host4profit however offers its client a 3GB bandwidth per month. Can you see why everybody is switching to Host4profit now?
4. The support provided both online and offline to ensure you can sleep soundly at night.
This is the area that is overlooked most often whenever the novice webmaster signs up for a webhosting contract. It is absolutely important ( burn this into your head) I repeat absolutely important to ensure that you get a web hosting company that will answer your calls and ensure your website stays up and running even if you call them at 2 am in the morning to request for help. I am talking about 24 hours support everyday of the week and also relevant safety measures implemented in the data center at which your server resides. I highly recommend you find out more about the location of the data center about the power supply facilities, where it is situated and also the safety measures that have been put in place such as fire protection and relevant data backup facilities to a remote location as a safety should a physical destruction occur that literally wipes out the whole data center ( although I think this is highly unlikely unless George Lucas must have been tingling with the wrong button at his huge animation studios and manage to bring Darth Vader back to life).
Arvind Gawade is a fully certified IT expert/consultant. He holds a Diploma in Information Technology specializing in Network Engineering. He is also an internet marketing expert that has been providing marketing services on the web for the past 2 years. Arvind and his team will train you to become an internet expert within a year for free and also build a free website for you within 24 hours. Visit his site for more info at: http://www.neptune500.com