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When your business needs an online presence a website is like an open shop or office 24 hours a day. Your normal hours may be 9 to 5 but when you have an online business people will drop by anytime. Choosing a reliable, proven and affordable web host for your site is very critical to your businesses success. Downtime and script failures can account for way more than the associated costs of paying for your web hosting.

When it comes to Business web hosting and your credibility cheap hosting is not always better. Business web hosting is like Internet real estate and a web based business that is taken good care will increase in value. If you want to build a web site, you need web-hosting services to store your files and bandwidth to access your site.

You also need to consider that you may want to expand your site in the future and that your traffic will increase the longer your site is online. Not all web hosts offer the same services. Following is a list you need to consider when deciding on where to host your website.

1, Avoid the free domain with signup. Many webmasters have joined web hosting that offered a free domain name when they joined only to find they couldn't transfer it to another web host later if they decided to switch hosts. You can buy a domain for a few dollars so why take the risk? Later, if you decide you don't need the site anymore you can usually sell a domain from an established site for a tidy profit.

2, The minimum requirements for web hosting you have now may change. When you first put your site online you may have decided you don't need forums or a reciprocal linking script; or that you don't want a Blog. However, as your site develops and you realize the importance of being able to interact with your potential and established customers you need to have mysql to house your Blogs database. The minimum services a good web host should supply is curl, mysql, php 4.0 or higher. Access to your error log and web site statistics log file.

3, Uptime is critical. If your site is down because your server has crashed then you will not only lose customers but credibility. Very few people will return to a site that they have never visited before if when they arrive its offline. Many web hosts claim an uptime of 99.9 percent but often in their small print they have disclaimers to offset what ever guarantees they give on their sales pages. You need to Google their name and go through a few of the results if they have used dishonest statements to convince customers to join up with them you'll nearly always find results of them doing so in the search results.

4,Security issues are something you need to take into account as well. Your customers wont appreciate it if hackers are able to circumvent your site's security procedures and obtain their details and steal funds or their identity.

5,Another very important aspect of choosing where to host your site is the type of hosting you want. Having a dedicated server that you don't share with others may be a possibility, and your site will probably load quicker; or shared hosting where you share a server with other web sites. Shared hosting can lead to slower loading times and more security issues but is a lot cheaper. If you decide to go with a shared option try to get some feedback from others using the same service before you join. A high percentage of web hosting problems are caused by using shared hosting.

What ever you decide your hosting requirements are, you need to shop around and make sure you get feedback from a number of sources before signing up to anything. Always read the small print; especially their terms of service as this can avoid some surprises later on down the track. Take into account your online business may grow or diversify. Technology is always changing and so are the ways we as webmasters can interact with our visitors. If you take all these factors into account then you will truly be making an informed decision when choosing your hosting provider.