There are now so many I'd be afraid to count them. Every man and his dog owns a web hosting company. Everyone seems to have a server, be it running on a dial up modem providing very bad service and speed to running in a multi link network operating centre with environmental control, armed security guards and escorted entrance. Wow. But with so many providers out there all differing levels of service and products, how can you know which to go with? Well, I'm glad you asked. Here are some simple questions and rules to adhere to while shopping for your next web hosting provider.

You need to know about their uptime policy. What uptime level guarantee do they offer? This is quite important. If you can't offer anything better than 98-99% at least then steer away! Is this high? Not at all. It's a standard in the hosting industry to offer at least 99%. The high end ones offer 99.999% uptime (roughly meaning that out of an entire year, they are only allowed 5.39 mins downtime total!), while others would offer simply 99% or 99.something%.

Uptime and availability are very important. Especially if you had just started a new marketing campaign or been handing out a lot more business cards recently and these new potential clients enter in your website address into their browser and your web hosting provider has overcrowded their systems or has gone down, what will happen? Well simply, it will time out, they wont be able to visit your site and would most likely visit your competitor's site, which has stayed up trouble free all this time! Is it worth risking your business to a less than competent hosting provider? I didn't think so,

Bandwidth is important. This is major. Without bandwidth your visitors wont be able to visit you, or even if they do, their visit will be very slow, which could translate into an image in their mind of your business matching (i.e.: being equally slow!). Another factor in this is bandwidth capacity. If you expect a lot of visitors (and if you aren't, I'd suggest you're in the wrong business!), you'll want to be able to accommodate them all. I suggest starting at a minimum of 1GB (gigabyte