If you are starting a new website, web hosting is a service you cannot do without. When we say web hosting, we are referring to the companies which provide space on their servers, bandwidth and networking equipment which enables your site to be on the web. Without a web host for your site, it doesn’t matter how much work you put into it; no one is going to see it unless it is online.

There are a lot of different web hosting companies out there, each of which offers a different array of packages and service options. Before you even begin looking for a web hosting company for your site, you need to sit down and carefully consider exactly what features you want your website to be able to offer. If you'd prefer to jump straight to our recommendations, then visit http://www.affordablewebhost.org otherwise stay here and keep reading.

Perhaps you’d like to have the capability for users to upload video or audio content, or you want to offer downloads of video or audio. You may want a message board, a hit counter or other features. Make a list of all of these features you want for your site – this will let you know what to look for in a web hosting company as you shop around.

There are free hosting options available, but these are not really suitable if your website is for a business. These sites offer a very limited feature set and typically a very low bandwidth limit as well. Besides this, having a freely hosted website gives visitors to your site an unflattering impression of your company. Unless you just want to use free web hosting as a sort of training ground for evaluating different web hosting features, avoid using these hosts for your business. If you are building a site for personal use however, it is fine to use free web hosting if you want to save a little money on this cost.

The next consideration is shared versus dedicated web hosting. Shared hosting is just what it sounds like – your website will be sharing space on one of the web hosting companies’ services with many other websites.

This is also not really ideal for a business website; you can run into difficulties due to the actions of other websites hosted on the same server.

For example, if one of the other sites uses too much bandwidth, this can slow down the performance of your site. It is far better to opt for dedicated web hosting for a business website.

One of the most important things to think about here is the level of technical support and customer service offered. Your website will only be as strong as the capabilities of the support staff behind it. Look into the reputation of the company in regards to these factors – if possible, speak with some current customers to see what they think of the support and service offered by the company.

There are other considerations which should go into your choice of web hosting; uptime, the operating system used on the server (Windows vs. Linux) and others. However, the tips given here should get you started thinking about your needs for a web hosting company and get you on your way to finding a web hosting company which is right for you.