Web Hosting

In determining your web hosting needs and provider you need to review the following aspects.
Are you going to host internally or use an external hosting service (most websites are hosted on a hosting company’s equipment)?
How much are you willing to pay for hosting?
How many email addresses will you need for your business?
What type of customer service will the hosting company provide? Such as 24/7 phone support, email only support or some other variation. What type of reliability do you expect? Such as 99% uptime, 95% uptime and so on. The higher the uptime required the higher the cost. If you are paying for web hosting ensure that FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, MySQL, crontabs are available. Whilst you might not need all these technologies at the start it is good to know they are available for your future planning.
Ensure your provider has SSL (secure server), Shopping Cart, Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding and a Control Panel options available.
Check reviews of the provider from various avenues on the internet.
NOTE: Free hosting whilst available is not a good idea, it makes you look cheap and in return advertisements appear from other companies on your web pages. Also, if you are using the services of an external designer and they recommend a web hosting provider, do your own due diligence and research the hosting provider yourself.