This will be one of the most important decisions you make for your website. You want to be sure you choose the correct hosting company the first time so you don't have to move your site a few months later when you are unhappy with some of the features. If you have a commercial site and need business hosting you should be looking at the features, these are very important, do not focus so much on the price. If you are creating a personal site or a site for your hobbies you can focus more on the price because some of the advanced features will not be important for you.

Now some of the cheaper companies may offer great features but you need to be sure that you are doing research on each company. If you are going to have a site that has a lot of multimedia then you are going to want a host that will offer a higher bandwidth to support your site. One important feature to look for is that your site will be in operation 24 hours a day. You need to look for 24 hour support, and that the customer service is dependable and available at all times. If you are not a technical person you want to be sure your provider has an easy to use control panel, that allows you to control your mailbox, your domain and sub domains and also your FTP files in an easy manner.

Another option to consider is choosing a company that will cover several internet solutions; web design, web development, web updates, hosting and possible internet access if you are going to have employees that need to access the site also. You may consider talking to anyone you know that has there own site, see what company they use and get there opinions. Also talk to acquaintances you have met online, they can be a bigger resource then you may realize.

One thing to look out for are the hosting review websites. 99.999% of these sites only list companies that pay them affiliate commissions. It might seem like they really recommend a host for the right reasons but often the host they recommend as #1 usually pays the highest affiliate payout. Be sureto do your own research and don't be afraidto call the host yourself and ask any questions you may have.