Forget free hosting

There are still a number of web hosting providers who will give you very basic web hosting services for free, this is perfect for a hobby site but not acceptable for any kind of serious business. The major downside of free hosting are the advertising banners shown on your site without your intervention, and the very poor set of feature provided, usually not including essential features like SSL, unlimited POP3 email accounts, a CGI bin, PHP 5.2, Ruby on Rails email and unlimited MySQL databases.

Watch the limits

There will be further restrictions like storage space and bandwidth transfer allocation, in particular a low threshold of bandwidth transfer can create very expensive overage charges, as much as $10 per Mb, which can be one of the major sources of income of unscrupulous hosts.

Consumer laws avoided

No matter how good it looks, free hosting is to be avoided for one overwhelming reason, you have no consumer rights when you do not pay and if your site disappears overnight, you will have no recourse. Likewise if the server is often down (which is very likely in this arena) you have no comeback and cannot even complain. When you examine the small print you will find that you will have given away all your normal rights and the company can do whatever it pleases with your content, sometimes it's a lot more than using it to sell advertising.

Many copies of your site online

In extreme cases, free hosts have been known to copy their clients websites if they are good, copy them onto another domain and sell them on Ebay.

Use a host with clients

Ask your host for some sites they can let you see. It's normal that web hosts do not give out long lists of clients for operational security and client privacy reasons. But each host should have one or two sites they are happy for you to see. These should be sites that share the same server as your site, if you are going for shared hosting, the most popular type.

Check the Blacklists

Check and make contact

One of the most important things that people often don't do, despite web hosting being a critical issue for their business is to check the people involved.

Find the real people

The host should have a phone number that you can call, although many hosts are truly global and staff can be in the wrong timezone to you, at the least you should be able to leave a message and receive a callback from a human. Don't be afraid to ask questions and base your next move on how you feel about the person and the professionalism they project. If they can't answer your questions to your satisfaction, walk away, there are a lot of amateurs operating hosting companies whoare capable of bluffing their way through until confronted by a real conversation.

Facilites

The facilities that you should have at your disposal can be found elsewhere on this site, suffice to say that any limitations is not acceptable, you need the full tool set at your fingertips, anything else is not enough.

Power

You may have to move up should your site be a major success. Choose a host like Celtic Pro Hosting who can migrate your server from shared, to dedicated, to clustered, to distributed overnight with no disruption.