Be selective when choosing your web hosting company. Web Hosting isn't like buying groceries. Why, because there are a lot of areas that you have to consider even for a simple and straight forward web page.

It would be helpful to you if you could consider the following areas when approaching your potential web hosting company I have also included some of the rational behind just for your knowledge.

Any sound customer support systems in place?

Nowadays, there are many web-hosting providers in the market. Some of them serve their customers promptly while some don't.

One of thing you could do here is to ask some pre-sales questions. Wait and see their response period. The industry standard calls for 24hrs respond time. If they don't respond within 24 hrs, you may likely do not have a good services in future if you subscribe to their host.

Knowing their Server systems, technology, Data Centers, and Back-up schedules.

Web-hosting provider typically uses a server to host the websites which forms his basic infrastructure. Back-systems are scheduled to run automatically and these servers are backed-up as frequently as daily with some hosting providers.

Check out with your potential hosting company what kind of technology they use and whether they have any reliable back-up systems at traceable data-centers. You could also check out whether they are equipped technically and whether they have technical people on roll.

Understanding their company data, financial standing and profitability:

You must be thinking what is it to do with the web-hosting provider's financial standing. This is just to make sure that you will not be talking to that fly-by-night operator.

Checking the scope of service provided

Of course, you must also know what type of services your potential web hosting company can offer to you. Do they have the range to suit your requirements with your allocated budgets?

If you intend to expand your internet business, you may like to check with them different application platforms such as forum, shopping carts, autoresponder, etc

Some of the web hosting company may have difficulties providing autoresponder.

If you intend to add in video, audio clips, and those interactive contents into your webpage, you will need to more about the bandwidth that they will be providing.

Hosting reliability and up-time guarantee

This is the most important areas that you should be consider. What is Up-time?

Up-time is the time (expressed in percentages) the host is available to access through the Internet.

You would have seen a lot of hosting providers mention a 99.9 % up-time guarantee. But then, you ought to realize that any hosting application environment calls for maintenance too. You should ask how the web-hosting provider manages to shuffle this time efficiently and how do they manage their maintenance.