After you get the domain, you are going to need to get web hosting, which allows you to publish your website to the web. Unlike the early 2000s, there are now hundreds of web hosting companies that offer you a lot of different features, and usually for a pretty good price. With there being so many options, here are a few things to look for when choosing the best hosting company for your website.

1. Uptime and Reliability are without a doubt the most important things to look for, as not only your business, but SEO is negatively affected when your site does not load, or loads slowly. A lot of web hosting companies now offer a guarantee of 99% uptime per month. If possible,look for one that guarantees this, and will issue you some sort of refund if they are down for long periods during a given month.

2. Large Disk Space and Bandwidth is important if you plan on having a large site with thousands of web pages and expect large loads of traffic. Most websites do not take up too much space, so do not automatically go for the higher numbers unless your site has a lot of web pages, images and videos. Bandwidth deals with the amount of bytes transferred from your site to your visitors. Most new sites can get by with limited bandwidth, but as your site grows, you may want to look into getting more space by getting plans with more bandwidth or getting dedicated servers.

3. Look for features like PHP, MySQL, Perl, FTP, and more. Without these tools, your site may not work properly. It is also good to see if they offer any extras like e-commerce solutions, SSL, Google AdWords credit and more.

4. Having a Control Panel that allows you to manage your site is common, but you want to make sure it is one of the features. Control Panels easily help you add and delete email addresses, add and delete users, change usernames and passwords, and more.

5. Make sure they offer 24 hour customer support, and make sure their support is even any good. One of the worst things is not being able to get in touch with anyone when you are having problems with your site because they are either closed for the weekend or longer. Your site is up 24/7 so you need the same support.

Hosting providers offer all sorts of bells and whistles to entice you to sign up with them because there is so much competition. Make sure you read through the fine print and review everything they are offering to make sure you are making the right decision for your business.