Choosing the right web host company for your internet business will place you in a vantage position to make more money online than you may ever imagine. Therefore, this article has been specifically written to address the many issues of web site hosting. Hosting your web site is so important that knowing 'what services to expect' from your hosting company should not be downplayed. Otherwise, you will end up having sleepless nights ruminating over why you are not making enough sales to cater for your ever-increasing overheads and ultimately making tidy profits.

As you may be aware, a web host is a company that provides the services of hosting your web server on the internet for the world to see, view, analyze, visit, patronize, etc as to what your web site offers in the form of products and services. The inability of surfers, spiders and web crawlers to access your web site's information will mean no sufficient visitors that will convert to leads, sales and then customers. What you are then left with is a "Glorified Web Site" that cannot pay back its investment.

Like the foundation of a house, web host is the foundation of your business. If your web host is down, you are down too. Your business needs 99.9% uptime and 0% downtime to remain in business and be profitable. So, take a checklist of the following to know if you are on track.

1. Plan your web site and your requirements.

2. Check your prospective web host to know if they will be able to meet your requirements.

3. Check to see if you will be able to upgrade from one Price Plan to another as your business grows.

4. Check if there is "bundle pricing" and discount if you do one-stop shopping from your host.

5. Check if their services are fully data based driven with an easy to use Content Manager. This includes a lot of features like Web Pages availability, Disk Space, Bandwidth and Instant Set Up. Others include: Domain/FTP features i.e. sub domains, FTP accounts. I will include here Supported Features: MySQL, CGI, PHP, Perl, Python, SSL, Cron, Frontpage, Curl, GD, Image Magick, Streaming Video and Music, Free Module Installation. For E-mail: Pop3 Accounts, Web mail, E-mail alias, Autoresponders, Mailing List, Catch All, Spam Assassin, Mail Forward, IMAP, SMTP should be considered. Please don't forget Control Panel Features: Fantastico Hot! Hotlink Protection, IP Deny Manager, Custom Error Pages, Instant PHP Nuke, Instant Chatroom, Instant GuestBook, Instant Counter, Instant FormMail, Redirect URL, Web Based FTP, PW Protected Directories, PHPMyAdmin. See how you can be helped with Web/FTP Statistics: AWStats with real time updates, Webalizer, Raw Log Access, Error Log, Analog. And lastly, the E-commerce Features: Shared SSL, Angora Shopping Cart, Instant osCommerce, Instant Zencart and Cube Cart.

You may not need all of these, but you need to know how you will be supported when the need arises. I suggest you check here www.sitesell.com/eforte.html for a peek of what I am writing about. That way you won't be taken ABACK!