1. How strong is their technical support division? What do they provide? When are they available? Does tech support cost extra?

2. How secure is the site? What type of protection do they offer? How can they insure that unauthorized users will not compromise the integrity of your Web site?

3. How much storage do they offer? A typical Web site uses between 20-30 MB. Do they offer enough extra megabytes to for your business to grow into? 100MB is a good starting point.

4. Will they register your Domain name? How long will it take? Is there any extra cost to you?

5. Do they have a builder that you can manage easily? What type of computer background do you need to design your site? Do you have internal control over content and updates?

6. How many email aliases comes with your package? Will they have your domain name in them for a more professional appearance? What is the cost to add extra emails? Are there any additional costs?

7. Are search engine submissions included in your package? How does it work? Do you have internal control over content and updates?

8. What are the costs involved? What are the initial setup fees and what do you get exactly? What are the monthly maintenance fees are what do they cover? Are there any additional charges? If so, what are they and why?

9. Am I locked into a contract? May I cancel at anytime? Are there any penalty fees for switching or closing my account? What happens to my content?

10. What makes them better than their competition? Do they offer extra features, storage space, better technical support or better pricing? What exactly sets them apart?

At the end I just want to make sure you follow those questions, so you will not feel traped in the long run.

Brett Slansky: Providing Small Business Owners An Opportunity To Increase In Customers And Sales, While Lowering Advertising Cost With The Help Of Internet.

It is a fact well known to those who know it well that choosing the right domain name can provide a huge asset to your online business.
Occasionally however, it seems that the hunt for that perfect name leads some business owners to purchase domains which are open to misinterpretation or contain an outright double meaning.

Read more [+]

While optimizing your website with good keywords is an important part of your search engine strategy, I do think however, that too many webmasters spend way too much time tweaking it to death. I don’t think that this is a good idea nor do I think that it is beneficial to their website. All that time spent on one thing while neglecting the rest of their marketing strategies in the long run is hurting their online business. So much time is wasted getting those keywords just right actually hurts the quality of the content on their web pages.
Read more [+]

If you have or are planning to have several domains running on the web, then you should consider getting a multiple domain hosting. Multiple domain hosting allows you to host several domains under a single hosting plan. Most web hosting companies call it shared hosting.

The main advantage of multiple domain hosting is it helps to consolidate all your domains under one hosting plan. It makes domain management a breeze. It also makes it easier to modify any settings since you are doing it from the same control panel.
Read more [+]

Low prices mean nothing if they don’t come with reliable web hosting. There is a clear correlation between the reliability and the longevity of most web hosting companies. And while it is intuitively obvious that these traits go hand in hand, there is quite a bit more to it than just a simple correlation.

The fact is that it takes both money and talent to provide low cost, reliable web hosting services. And as a web hosting company’s business volumes grow, the complexities of maintaining reliability grow exponentially.

Great Hosts

The most reliable web hosting providers are the ones who are adept at using state of the art system management tools to ensure optimum performance and minimal service disruption. The very best of them employ redundant servers and mirror sites that instantly take over when one or more servers experience the inevitable glitches that create service interruptions.

How they do this is not really the concern of most webmasters who host their sites with them. What matters is that they can count on their websites being available all the time and accessible with great speed.

Two ways to find reliable low cost yet reliable web hosting services

One way is to examine the web host’s service guarantee. This will always be expressed as an availability percentage, always greater than 99%. But 99% is not very good at all if you are going to operate a serious business online.

The fact is that 99% availability calculates out to a web site that is down the equivalent of 22 four hour periods per year, hardly acceptable in an age of 24/7 customer expectations. And this doesn’t even count availability impacted by network problems outside the web host’s control.

So what should you be looking for? All truly reliable web hosting companies offer uptime guarantees in the 99.8 – 99.9 range without a lot of fine print.

A second way is to verify access speeds. You can easily do this yourself by trying to access the web sites of the hosting company’s other clients at various times of the day, week, month, or quarter. If it’s always speedy then that’s a pretty good indicator of what you can expect for your web site.

If playing “mystery shopper” at all hours of the day and night is a bit too tedious for you, there are a number of services such as Alexa.Com who publish speed ratings. For example, you can see that this site, Web-Host-Watch, ranks in the top 4 percent of all web sites in terms of access speed.

No matter whose web hosting services you choose, there is no reason to accept anything less than speedy access and 24/7 reliable web hosting.

Another important trait of all great web hosting providers is: flexibility.

About the Author

Anthony Hamill is the founder of Web-Host-Watch.Com which helps online business owners master the basics of web hosting. Get all the facts you need to find affordable web hosting plans including tutorials, tips on avoiding common mistakes, a glossary of web hosting terms